How Using an In-Tray Can Tame Your Anxieties
Netting the sea monsters that lurk in your mind
Life is about action. And action is about completing the incomplete.
You regard something as incomplete because it has room for improvement and therefore is unsatisfactory, maybe anxiety-inducing, in its current state. An incomplete can be an opportunity not yet seized or a threat not yet countered.
Your incompletes live in your head. They swim around your psyche like sea monsters. Nearly all of them are submerged beneath your conscious attention. Some swim just below the surface, gnawing at the lower fringes of your attention, distracting you, and preventing you from being fully present with whatever you’re doing. Periodically an incomplete will rear its ugly head above the surface of your attention and take an emotional bite out of you in the form of anxiety, dread, stress, shame, or regret.
At that point, the executive function “you”—the navigator of your mind—can do one of two things.
You can steer your attention away from the incomplete. Maybe you don’t want to get bitten again, so you flee from the psychic sea monster, hoping it will resubmerge and leave you alone.
That is the coward’s way out, and it is, at best, a temporary escape and a foolishly shortsighted solution. So long as the incomplete remains incomplete, your mind will keep reminding you of it. Until you finally deal with it, it will resurface again and again, taking an emotional bite out of you each time.
The alternative to the coward’s way out is the hero’s way forward. The superior, wiser, and braver solution is to actually deal with your incompletes as they emerge and before they have a chance to resubmerge.
There are two ways of doing that.
You can slay or tame the beast then and there by immediately doing whatever it takes to fully complete the incomplete. However, that is not always practical. The process of completing an incomplete may be a time-intensive and complex project. And sometimes a sizeable incomplete will emerge in your mind when you have more urgent fish to fry.
Generally, the wisest way to deal with an emergent incomplete is to quickly capture the beast for later slaying/taming. This is what David Allen counsels people to do in his great book and program Getting Things Done.
For example, whenever an incomplete seizes your attention, you can seize it back by writing a reminder of it on a piece of paper or a digital note. Collect those reminders in a place designated for them, like a letter tray or a digital folder. Then regularly revisit that “in” receptacle to fully process its contents.
The more you reliably do that, the less anxious and insecure you will feel. If you are confident that you will fully process whatever you capture in external writing, then your mind will regard any captured incomplete as good as slain/tamed and so will stop nagging you about it. Any incomplete that you net in your in-tray will no longer lurk in the depths of your psyche.
In Babylonian myth, the hero Marduk caught the sea dragon of chaos Tiamat in a net before creating the orderly, habitable world out of it. Capturing chaos is often the first step toward resolving it into order.
If wielded wisely, the humble in-tray, like the net of Marduk, can be a mighty weapon for taming the chaotic incompletes in your mind.
