Business Insight Zone

One of the deep teachings of inbox-fu:

“ReSaDoTh” — Make folders: “Read,” “Say,” “Do,” and “Think”
and put every message in the inbox into one of them.
Focus on them in reverse order.

~ ~ ~

Read:

To do our jobs well, we must inform ourselves well. We need enough data. We need meaningful, contextual information organized into actionable knowledge. Set aside the joys of reading a good book or your favorite magazine: the savvy businessperson will always maintain a thirst for new knowledge.

Yet the chances are that some of the reading material lurking in your inbox is not so important. It isn’t meaningful, or it lacks context, or it isn’t actionable. Or, if your experience is like mine, it’s just redundant: it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know about the world, your industry, your company, or how you personally could do your job better.

File your reading and let it simmer. By the time you get back to it, you may be surprised at how clear it is that most of it can be discarded unread. Meanwhile, there are things you need to . . .

Say:

It seems that we spend our whole days talking — in meetings, on the phone, in the hallways, or by “talking” online via e-mail, IMs, Twitter, what-have-you.

Communication is a key part of what makes us human. It is perennially listed as one of the most vital needs — even the most vital — of successful businesses, and not surprisingly as one of the biggest challenges for virtually every company.

And yet we can talk ourselves to death. There’s a reason the Japanese coined the proverb “Talk does not cook rice.” Far too tempting to talk about the projects we mean to tackle, the actions we mean to take, rather than simply executing them.

If someone needs a two-line answer to a question, send that e-mail, archive the question, and be done with it. If an e-mail requires more talk than that, file it under “Say” for the moment, because you should put a higher priority on . . .

Do:

Actions speak louder than words. They can’t help it. Words embrace ideas, but actions embody them, make them real in the concrete world around us.

Many of the e-mails in your inbox require an action from you. The things to be read and the conversations to be had were removed in the two steps above. The hard thinking is yet to come. In between are the nagging but necessary minutiae of every job, every profession.

But how necessary? As you file your “Do” e-mails, consider taking the short, sharp action of deleting the least important of them. If the cake is perfect, the icing is probably irrelevant. Focus on doing the cake right, and do the icing only if there is time for it, and if the effort is worth the return.

Think:

In the hurly-burly of the business world, it is easy to become overwhelmed by all the noise around us. Some of the sharpest professionals I know carve out time for themselves — in a home office, in the coffee shop — where they are removed from all the interruptions of the workplace, and where they can actually think about the work that must be done.

It’s tempting to think that this is a new phenomenon, brought on by cell phones and conference calls and the Internet and . . . well, your inbox. But in fact humans have been lamenting the hustle and bustle of cities for centuries, and the speed of modern life at least since the spread of the steam train. It’s just magnified now — everything faster, more channels, more noise to filter out, a more diffuse signal to detect.

Detecting that signal amid the noise means the difference between achieving breakthroughs or toiling in vain. If you don’t think deeply about what you’re after, why you’re after it, and what the consequences of those choices are, you’ll never draw a bead on your real work, and you’ll never rise above the crowd in business, whether we’re talking about your personal efforts or the work of your team / department / company.

It’s worth it to think. You might get by with as little as two hours of it per week. But you’re going to need to do it, you should do it before you jump onto other things, and you should be ready to do it when you reach that quiet place where you can ponder what you’re really after in your work.

Which is where the “Think” folder comes in. Start from there and do your best.

~ ~ ~

Now, what do YOU think of this method?

~

Previously . . .

• Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu
• 11 Ancient Secrets of the Dragon Claw School of Inbox-Fu

~

Photos: read; speak; labor; think. All used under Creative Commons Attribution or Share Alike licenses.

Category: Productivity