Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Seeing the Same Thing Differently

Confronted with a soul-suckingly deep pile of email in my in-box yesterday, I felt some level of despair.  I had to get through it but found the prospect extremenly discouraging.

When I recalled a trick I had read some years ago.  Rather than looking at the inbox with its default listing of most recent email first, resort the pile.  Sort it alphabetically by Subject.  Sort it by sender.  Reverse sort it by sender.  Anything.  Make the pile look different.

So I did.  And I quickly whittled the pile of 50+ emails down to the 10 that truly needed attention. 

And then I wondered: "Why is such a dumb little trick so effective?  I didn't alter the pile...I just rearranged it.  Why did is cease to be a despair-inducing exercise?"

I think it is just the new sequence.  Busting out of the chronological sequence into some other sequence, even one that doesn't make much sense.  It makes the inconsequential emails about available free kittens seem even more silly and more easily deleted. 

Which is also why it's good to look at any process backwards, rather than forwards.  You see new things.  And silly things which are so very deletable. 


Click here to subscribe to Learning about Lean by email.

3 comments:

Norbert said...

As in GTD, latest and loudest is hardly the most efficient approach to processing. By doing as you described you remove the responsibility that you feel for responding to the latest and I believe that enables curiosity and creativity to come through.

dissertation writing service said...

As contended by Allen in the underneath TED Talk, deficiency of time isn't generally an issue for a great many people. The test isn't having space to think or 'mind data transfer capacity' for more innovative, important work. With such a great amount of data readily available and various responsibilities, it's anything but difficult to end up overpowered or pushed and squander vitality simply getting things done on auto-pilot.

summaorublogger said...

The OnlyFans account is a service page free onlyfans hack