If you're not sure yet what you're going to be using as a personal reminder system, don't worry. You can begin very appropriately with the low-tech initial process of notes on pieces of paper. You can always upgrade your tools later, once you have your system in place.
The best way to learn this model is by doing. But there are a few basic rules to follow:
• Process the top item first.
• Process one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into "in."
Top Item First
Even if the second item down is a personal note to you from the president of your country, and the top item is a piece of junk mail, you've got to process the junk mail first! That's an exaggeration to make a point, but the principle is an important one: everything gets processed equally. The verb "process" does not mean "spend time on." It just means "decide what the thing is and what action is required, and then dispatch it accordingly." You're going to get to the bottom of the basket as soon as you can anyway, and you don't want to avoid dealing with anything in there.
Process does not mean "spend time on."
Emergency Scanning Is Not Processing
Most people get to their in-basket or their e-mail and look for the most urgent, most fun, or most interesting stuff to deal with first."Emergency scanning" is fine and necessary sometimes (I do it, too). Maybe you've just come back from an off-site meeting and have to be on a long conference call in fifteen minutes. So you check to make sure there are no land mines about to explode and to see if your client has e-mailed you back OK'ing the big proposal.
But that's not processing your in-basket; it's emergency scanning. When you're in processing mode, you must get into the habit of starting at one end and just cranking through items one at a time, in order. As soon as you break that rule, and process only what you feel like processing, and in whatever order, you'll invariably begin to leave things unprocessed. Then you will no longer have a functioning funnel, and it will back up all over your desk and office.
LIFO or FIFO?
Theoretically, you should flip your in-basket upside down and process first the first thing that came in. As long as you go from one end clear through to the other within a reasonable period of time, though, it won't make much difference. You're going to see it all in short order anyway. And if you're going to attempt to clear up a big backlog of e-mails staged in "in," you'll actually discover it's more efficient to process the last-in first because of all the discussion threads that accumulate on top of one another.
The in-basket is a processing station, not a storage bin.
One Item at a Time
You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to your psyche because you know right away what to do with it—and you don't feel like thinking about what's in your hand. This is dangerous territory. What's in your hand is likely to land on a "hmppphhh" stack on the side of your desk because you become distracted by something easier, more important, or more interesting below it.
Most people also want to take a whole stack of things out of the in-basket at once, put it right in front of them, and try to crank through it. Although I empathize with the desire to "deal with a big chunk," I constantly remind clients to put back every-thing but the one item on top. The focus on just one thing forces the requisite attention and decision-making to get through all your stuff. And if you get interrupted (which is likely), you won't have umpteen parts of "in" scattered around outside the tray and out of control again.
The Multitasking Exception
There's a subtle exception to the one-item-at-a-time rule. Some personality types really need to shift their focus away from some-thing for at least a minute in order to make a decision about it.When I see this going on with someone, I let him take two or sometimes three things out at once as he's processing. It's then easier and faster for him to make a choice about the action required.
Remember, multitasking is an exception — and it works only if you hold to the discipline of working through every item in short order, and never avoid any decision for longer than a minute or two.
Nothing Goes Back into "In"
There's a one-way path out of "in." This is actually what was meant by the old admonition to "handle things once," though handling things just once is in fact a bad idea. If you did that, you'd never have a list, because you would finish everything as soon as you saw it. You'd also be highly ineffective and inefficient, since most things you deal with are not to be acted upon the first time you become aware of them. Where the advice does hold is in eliminating the bad habit of continually picking things up out of "in," not deciding what they mean or what you're going to do about them, and then just leaving them there. A better admonition would be, "The first time you pick something up from your in-basket, decide what to do about it and where it goes. Never put it back in "in."
You've got the message. You're going to deal with one item at a time. And you're going to make a firm next-action decision about each one. This may sound easy — and it is — but it requires you to do some fast, hard thinking. Much of the time the action will not be self-evident; it will need to be determined.
On that first item, for example, do you need to call someone? Fill something out? Get information from the Web? Buy something at the store? Talk to your secretary? E-mail your boss? What? If there's an action, its specific nature will determine the next set of options. But what if you say, "There's really nothing to do with this"?
I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don't know where to begin.
— Stephen Bayne
What If There Is No Action?
It's likely that a portion of your in-basket will require no action. There will be three types of things in this category:
• Trash
• Items to incubate
• Reference material
Trash
If you've been following my suggestions, you'll no doubt already have tossed out a big pile of stuff. It's also likely that you will have put stacks of material into "in" that include things you don't need anymore. So don't be surprised if there's still a lot more to throwaway as you process your stuff.
Processing all the things in your world will make you more conscious of what you are going to do and what you should not be doing. One director of a foundation I worked with discovered that he had allowed way too many e-mails (thousands!) to accumulate— e-mails that in fact he wasn't ever going to respond to anyway. He told me that using my method forced him to "go on a healthy diet" about what he would allow to hang around his world as an incompletion.