I’m getting my email to zero right now (a bit late in the day), and came across a great example of how productivity is not just about getting as many things done as quickly as you can, but generating ideas and even taking some potential rabbit trails.

So, here’s how I work. I’m going through my messages one by one, determining the next actions and what responses are needed to each. One of these emails is yesterday’s blog post by Seth Godin on a new marketing class he is offering at Skillshare.

So, what’s the next action on that email? Just read it, decide I don’t have time for the class, and move on? That would be the efficiency model of productivity, which I reject.

Instead, with this email I sat back and asked myself some questions and observations like these:

• What does Seth’s blog post here teach us about how we should craft and present ideas in general? Godin is clearly a master at this. A blog post from him announcing a new course he is offering is not just an opportunity to decide whether to take the course or not; it’s an opportunity to learn about communication. 
• So in that vein, I notice that he talks about the course “changing the way you think about marketing.” Is that way of speaking just a way to get attention? Talk about change, so people will listen? Godin is a person of integrity; he speaks what he believes, rather than making things up just to get a response. Further, in my experience (confirmed more and more every day), things absolutely do need to be changed. This is actually the task of leadership: changing things. We live in a fallen world. So much is indeed sub-par and not helping people. To talk in terms of change is not just a way to “market” an idea. Things really do need to be changed. So I make a mental note that here is yet more confirmation that it is right to talk in terms of changing things, and that it is helpful to do so (the way Godin crafted his post certainly got me thinking in a constructive way).
• Godin links the wrong words in his post! You should never say “click here.” The words you link need to be information carrying. That is both more helpful and more effective. So, Godin is great, but not perfect (I’m sure he also has reasons for breaking this rule — but he’s wrong!).

So, though I am not going to enroll in his course, the value of this email from Godin’s blog is far beyond the fact that it notified me about the course. It helped build my thinking, and gave me an opportunity to think about how I do things and how I craft ideas.

That is a huge impact, and an impact that cannot be measured by the response rate to the actual post. That shows how productivity is about much more than tangible outcomes; intangibles (affecting how people think) are just as important — and, in fact, something that actually will result in tangible outcomes and great effectiveness down the road.

And this process also shows how productivity methods, like getting your email to zero every day, are not about rigid structure and just getting things off your list. Rather, they provide a framework in which exploration can happen. If we think of productivity as just getting things checked off our lists faster, we will miss the most important and enriching moments of life.

From David Allen’s latest newsletter (which you can subscribe to here), explaining why the world of work often seems so much harder now:

More and more these days I find that people in my seminars are resonating to the importance of defining our work. The challenge many of us face is to not only track, but accurately label all of our projects, and hang on to those “stakes in the ground” while the rest of the world seems to want to blow us away from them like we’re in a hurricane.

How many of you don’t have time to do your work, because you have so much work to do??!!

How many of you, in your jobs, are only doing what you were hired to do? (I never get one affirmative response in any group I query!)

I credit the late Peter Drucker for framing this issue better than anyone, from the macro perspective. He indicates that whereas fifty years ago 80% of our work force made its living by making or moving things, that number is now less than 20%. And that “knowledge work” demands a completely different paradigm of focus than we have been trained in as a professional culture.

The good news about making or moving something is that when you come to work, un-made and un-moved things make it real easy to know how to spend your day. You do not need “personal organization” other than the work that is obviously and visibly at hand. The bad news is that these days only a small percentage of us get to work and know what to do. The rest of us have to make it up. And very few (if any) of the people we interact with seem to be supporting our agenda.

So, it becomes critical for each of us to maintain a complete and accurately defined list of Projects, and to ensure that we review these at least weekly with real sincerity of focus, creating and capturing all the “oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to…” kind of next actions that need to happen to make our “work” happen.

This needs to include all the professional and personal projects about which you would like ideally for something to be happening during the course of an operational week. “R&D new camera”, “Finalize budget implementation”, “Refinance house”, “Reorganize office”, etc.

We were only trained and equipped in our culture to show up, and deal with the work at hand. We now have to train and equip ourselves, create our own targets and goal-lines, and tie safety ropes onto those outcomes to keep steady in our course against the winds of the world.

A good post by Scott Belsky at the 99%. The five types he discusses are:

1. Reactionary work
2. Planning work
3. Procedural work
4. Insecurity work
5. Problem-solving work

The three categories are:

1. Trash
2. Fileables
3. Action items

Every email or piece of paper is either an action item (to be done or delegated), information, or trash.

Often, some of the best ideas come from just hearing how other people do things. So I found it illuminating to read about the categories that Churchill divided his incoming paperwork into in Churchill on Leadership.

Seeing this illustrates how it can be helpful to pre-sort things before tackling them (whether electronic or physical). Here are his categories:

1. Top of the box (most important or urgent)
2. Foreign office telegrams
3. Service telegrams
4. Periodical returns (regular reports he had requested)
5. Parliamentary questions
6. For signature
7. To see
8. General Ismay (reports from chief of staff)
9. Answers other (other people besides Ismay)
10. Ecclesiastical
11. Weekend (low priority items to get to on the weekend)

From David Allen’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (p. 96):

When you have to focus on your system, you are detouring energy that could be used to create and produce with your system.

The objective of system installation, change, or enhancement is to get “system” off your mind again as soon as possible.

The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them. You want to be working, doing, thinking, creating, and dealing with things — not focused on how you’re doing them.

You want to enjoy driving your car in the countryside without thinking about how to shift gears or work the climate control.

Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.

Nine out of ten times, people have workflow systems that don’t work, because they are too much work.

Most of the organizing gear and software sold in the last twenty-five years makes sense conceptually but doesn’t function as fast as what people are trying to coordinate. When the amount of what has to be managed increases in speed and volume, a system will start to fall apart if its design is flawed or the habits of the operator are not grooved on “automatic.”

The president and CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers has a helpful post on his daily reading habits.

I blogged a few weeks ago on what Taco Bell teaches us about how to define and manage your next actions. Here’s another lesson from Taco Bell.

When you get up to the cash register (whether at Taco Bell or any fast food restaurant), it is interesting to note that the person taking your order and the person making your food are different.

Why is that relevant? Because if the same person had to do both, it would slow everything down. You would have to wait twice as long to get your food (probably longer, due to the costs of switch tasking), and the line would grow — frustrating everyone.

Here’s the problem: When it comes to productivity, most of us are both cashier and chef. We both have to receive and process the new input (cashier) and produce the results (chef). The time spent capturing and processing new input takes time away from delivering results. Sometimes, this can be substantial.

In fact, the amount of time that processing new input takes away from delivering results is larger than simply the time it takes to do the processing. The switch in mindsets from handling new stuff to focusing on delivering results creates a cost of its own. This can be minimized by making sure that you process new input in batches rather than continuously throughout the day. But it cannot be removed entirely.

What’s the solution? Unfortunately, I don’t have a complete one yet. There may not be one. Proper use of an assistant, for those fortunate enough to have one, is part of the answer but cannot solve the whole story. Batching the processing task is another, but again that is not a complete solution. Having an effective system in place and being efficient with it is a third component. But again, none of these totally solve the issue: the time (and energy — that’s huge) that you have to deliver results is decreased by the amount of time that you have to spend processing new input.

Maybe a skillful application of these three partial solutions is the best we can do. What are your thoughts?

In the meantime, if you need inspiration, just take a trip to Taco Bell.

I once heard David Allen say, “Sometimes people tell me that they don’t have a physical inbox. To which my response is: ‘Yes you do — that just means your whole house is your inbox.'”

It might be tempting these days to conclude that you don’t need to have any physical-based processing tools, since so much comes through digital channels. But inboxes are not just for email.

In spite of all the digital input we receive, there is still a steady stream of real physical input that also comes our way. For example, there is the regular mail, things your kids bring home from school, notes you jot down to yourself when it isn’t convenient to enter them into your electronic system right away, and so forth.

So it is a fact of reality that we have a bunch of incoming physical “stuff” that can be just as constant (although perhaps less in volume) as electronic input. This stuff, therefore, needs to be gathered and collected into a single spot — that is, an inbox — on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, it’s not as though you will be able to brag that you “don’t have a physical inbox.” Instead, what will happen is that your whole desk, your whole office, your whole house will become your inbox.

And the problem with that is this: It makes it hard to distinguish what is unprocessed from what is already where it should be. The result is that you will never have a sense of closure about what needs to be dealt with and what doesn’t, and things can easily fall through the cracks. You will start to drown in a sea of unprocessed stuff.

You need to gather all open loops into one spot, rather than letting them hang around all over. Which is the definition of an inbox.

Here’s an easy example of what this looks like in practice: When you get the mail, don’t just toss it on a counter somewhere, or your desk somewhere, to deal with “when you get to it.” Have an inbox, and put it in there.

Here’s a more advanced example: The other day we finally got a new digital camera (our old one broke after 5 excellent years of service). When I got home with all the packages (the actual camera, plus memory, camera bag etc.) but couldn’t deal with them right away, I didn’t just set them down somewhere to deal with when I get the chance. Rather, I put them into my inbox, then hung out with my kids.

Here’s one more example: Let’s say I need a new hammer, and my wife buys me one when she’s at the store. When she gets home, she doesn’t just put it on some shelf in the garage, trusting me to “notice” at some point that there is something new and out of place in there. Instead, she puts it in my inbox. That way I don’t need to notice or remember that there’s a new hammer out there in the garage that I need to put away at some point. Instead, I can just process it right along with everything else when doing my inbox.

It would be easy to say, “well, just setting a few camera boxes or a hammer down anywhere is no big deal.” Well, right. But if you do that every time, pretty soon you end up with a house (or desk) littered with “stuff to figure out what to do with.” Be diligent. Put stuff in your inbox and it won’t build up all over your desk (or house). The lack of an inbox — or an understanding of how to use them — is the single biggest reason desks get messy and rooms (like offices, garages, and so forth) get disorganized.

So now we’ve talked about why you should have a physical inbox. For details on how to process your inbox, see these posts:

1. How to Get the Mail
2. Going Through My Inbox

Last of all, here’s a useful point worth emphasizing: As you can see from the examples above, your inbox is not just something for other people to put stuff in. I put far more things in my own inbox than anyone else, which is as it should be.