Why You Shouldn’t Use Your Inbox as a To-Do List
Clarifying work is best done in batches
In my last essay, I explained how using inboxes (both physical and digital) instead of keeping your “incompletes” only in your head can ameliorate stress and anxiety. As I mentioned, that will only work if you are confident that you will regularly revisit your inboxes and deal with their contents.
But that presents another question: how exactly do you deal with your inbox stuff?
One option is to work through the stack by completing everything you need to do about each item. This is basically using your inbox as a to-do list.
To just “get ‘er done” like this may seem efficient, but it’s actually highly inefficient.
Fully dealing with every inbox item necessarily involves two kinds of work:
- Clarifying each action required
- Performing each action you clarify
After you clarify a next action, if performing it would be super-quick (taking, say, less than two minutes), then it would indeed make sense to just knock it out and be done with it.
But if it would take longer than that, it is actually more efficient to defer performing the next action by writing it on a “next actions list” and then proceed to clarifying the next item in your inbox. That is what David Allen counsels in his great book and program Getting Things Done.
That is because clarifying next actions is a very specific kind of work, involving concentrated thinking and deciding. If you sustain focus on that kind of work (a practice called “task batching”), you can get “in a groove” and start “cranking” through your inbox.
On the other hand, if you interrupt your clarifying work with other kinds of work (like spending a lot of time performing the actions you clarify), that is multitasking, which incurs what psychologists call “switching costs.” Those costs will limit the extent to which you can get “on a roll” with processing your inbox.
Clarifying is also more cognitively demanding than many other kinds of work. So if you happen to be fresh and sharp enough to clarify, it would make sense to keep at it and “make hay while the sun shines.”
And if you do that, you will end up with an inventory of next actions that you can batch and crank through even when you’re not so fresh and sharp, because most of the hard thinking and deciding will already have been done.
Use your inbox, not as a to-do list, but as a to-clarify list.
