Twenty years ago, I was on a road trip reading the Robert Heinlein novel Time Enough for Love and came across this line:
“Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime – and thereby gives you time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.”
While the idea of doubling my effective lifetime sounded enticing, I had no idea what a “therblig” was. I took pride in my vocabulary and was irritated by my ignorance. Definitions of rare words were not easy to come by while on vacation in an era before smart phones and Wikipedia. When I was able to check a dictionary some time later, I discovered that a therblig is a discrete element of motion and the term originated in the study of workplace motion economy. The idea is to plan operations (e.g. pack boxes) to minimize the number of therbligs necessary to complete a task, thereby saving time and money. The passage finally made perfect sense and the term therlig was cemented in my memory. It often comes to mind when I think about the myriad mental motions we go through everyday, and how many of them are wasted. If you are anything like me, then your single biggest sinkhole of squandered mental effort is email.
Email is undoubtedly an improvement over the paper memos and stamped envelopes of the past. However, the hassles involved in creating and sending a physical document usually ensured that at least some thought went into the message. That is hardly the case with email, given its near zero cost. Even assuming that actual spam is kept at bay, the flow of “legitimate” messages of low value can threaten to overwhelm. I reached a tipping point last year and had to take decisive action to avoid wasting precious hours every month. Here is what worked for me:
Clear Your Inbox – If there are multiple pages of messages in your inbox, then you have effectively archived the ones that are not on the first page. They are just as out of sight and out of mind as if they were tucked neatly into folders, or tagged and archived. The only thing they are accomplishing in your inbox is diluting your focus and raising your anxiety. A few months back, it took me most of the day to chop my work inbox down to a handful of messages. I have kept it that way ever since. Maintaining this discipline make me more decisive, and helps me identify and concentrate on the truly important messages.
Filter the Offers – My main email address collects “special offer” and “newsletter” emails like a ship’s hull collects barnacles, and gets slowed down in a similar fashion. I receive at least 100 of these emails a month and clearing them out of the inbox is almost like clearing a mine field. Who knows which ones will have a pitch interesting enough to distract me for five minutes before I even realize what is happening. After all, that is precisely what the authors of these emails design them to do. In order to reclaim my time, I set up a folder called “Offers” and set filters (here is a filter tutorial for Gmail) that bypass the inbox and send the offer emails straight to the folder. That way, I reverse the usual causality and I never see these emails unless I am in a (rare) shopping mood and deliberately go look at them.
Stop Emailing Documents to Collaborators – Email is a poor document management system. What happens when you email ten people asking for comments on a document? If you are lucky, you will only get ten emails back, with ten different versions of the document, all of which you need to collate manually. I have seen this sort scenario degenerate into a hundred messages or more as Jane forgets to cc everyone, Bob updates an obsolescent version, and John modifies the file name and inadvertently creates a parallel document, etc. Instead, place the file in an actual document management system and direct your collaborators to it. The term “document management system” is being used loosely here to mean any software system with the following minimum features:
- Single Point Storage and Access – The official version of the document should only reside in one place and that system must be accessible to all the collaborators.
- Version Control – The system should track changes to the document, making it easy to review the history of who changed what when.
- Backups – It is desirable to have a document exist only in one place to eliminate version confusion, but that can leave it vulnerable to hardware failures or other data loss events. Therefore, the storage systems must be routinely backed up.
Fortunately, a myriad of free, cloud-based tools including Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive provide all these features. Increasingly, these services also include online editing, which eliminates the need for your collaborators to download the file. There are similar systems you can install on your own hardware in cases where security requirements or regulations prevent you from giving your data to a third party. OwnCloud is one open-source do-it-yourself option.
Outsource the Routine Stuff – One great way to get less distracting email is to have an assistant get it instead. I used to think that having any kind of assistant was completely out of my budget constraints until I discovered the world of virtual assistants. It is no longer necessary to hire a local person on a full or part time basis to get help with online tasks. A menagerie of services exist to help with everything from single tasks to full time business services. Check out virtualassistantassistant.com for an overview. I am testing the waters with Fancy Hands and have found the service surprisingly useful. For example, one of their virtual assistants proofread this article. Delegating small tasks can take some getting used to if you have both perfectionist and do-it-yourself tendencies (like me), but the time savings can really add up. I did not think about it when I started, but using an assistant also has advantages in warding off unwanted email. Every time they contact a service provider on my behalf or order something for me from an online store, they have blocked another person or company from acquiring my primary email to use for later solicitations.
I encourage you to try some of these strategies and reclaim some of your time. You can certainly put it to better use, whether it is finishing your dissertation, starting that extra grant proposal, developing your network, or simply being with friends and family.