Clearing the Queues in Your Life

Long lines in front of the Pales­tine and Ori­ent Travel Agency. Berlin, Ger­many, Jan­u­ary 22, 1939

This is some­thing I got from one of my favorite blog­ger, Leo Babauta (isn’t it obvi­ous that he’s one of my favorites?!). I also have sev­eral queues in my life now. I think one of the main things is my gmail inbox. I have found a way to deal with that though and I’ve done quite well, I think, GTD style.

I will explain as you read the arti­cle about the other queues in my life.

Post writ­ten by Leo Babauta.

Are the queues in your life stress­ing you out?

Our lives are filled with queues, from email inboxes to your to-do lists to voice and text mes­sages to a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent inboxes in social net­works such as Twit­ter and Face­book to work appli­ca­tions to RSS read­ers and book­marked “to-read” arti­cles and more.

For many peo­ple, man­ag­ing all these queues is stress­ful, never-ending, and complex.

Let’s look at how to sim­plify things, how to clear your queues, and how to let go of the stress of man­ag­ing them all.

Queues That Rule Our Lives
One of my favorite blog­gers, Alex Payne, wrote a post a lit­tle while back called Life As A Series of Queues, and in the post he listed some of his queues. I’m repost­ing them here because they’re fairly typ­i­cal for a lot of peo­ple. Of course, your par­tic­u­lar list will def­i­nitely vary, but this is an example:

* work email (by far the most insid­i­ous queue)
* per­sonal email
* instant mes­sages (they queue while in meet­ings and away from the com­puter)
* text mes­sages
* missed phone calls and voice­mail
* @replies on Twit­ter
* direct mes­sages on Twit­ter
* requests for links to appli­ca­tions by Twit­ter API devel­op­ers
* requests for whitelist­ing by Twit­ter devel­op­ers
* code review requests
* tick­ets on our inter­nal bug tracker
* tick­ets on the Twit­ter API tracker
* items in my per­sonal to-do list
* cal­en­dar event requests
* unread items in my feed reader
* unread items in Instapaper

My per­sonal list would be fairly sim­i­lar, except that the main queues I have today are:

* my Gmail inbox
* Twit­ter DMs and @replies
* my to-do list (I switch between Taskpa­per, Gmail’s Task list, and text files on a whim)
* unread items in Instapa­per (a great to-read ser­vice if you don’t use it)

I also have voice­mail on my cell phone but never check it. I’ve (mostly) stopped using Google Reader as I dis­like hav­ing to keep up with RSS feeds. I don’t check other social net­work­ing sites as much as I should. I don’t have a paper inbox. And other types of items on Alex’s list are fun­neled into my Gmail or to-do lists, at least for the moment.

My own list is quite standard:

* I have my gmail inbox which used to fill up before but thanks to GTD, I have found a way to fix.
* Face­book
* my to-do list (I used iGTD for sev­eral months but have now switched to Mac’s TextE­dit as a means of keep­ing my to do list. I’ve found it more help­ful, more sim­ple and less of a pain to use.)
* unread arti­cles I’ve down­loaded from the net
* TEDTalks I keep in my ipod nano hop­ing to read some time in the future
* my other Pod­Cast subscriptions

What are your queues? It may be use­ful to make a list of your own so you can plan your strategy.

Strate­gies for Clear­ing the Queues

So now that we know just how many queues we have, how do we clear them or at least keep them man­age­able? Here are my favorite strate­gies — your mileage will vary. Also note that you won’t apply all strate­gies for every queue — pick the ones that work best.

1. Sim­plify your queues. Do you have 15–20 dif­fer­ent queues in your life? You might try to sim­plify and see if you can get them down to 4–6, as I have (or even fewer if you’re bold). This greatly sim­pli­fies things because you have fewer queues to check every day. A larger num­ber of queues is fine if they are already inte­grated into your daily rou­tine — if you check them all in the morn­ing and before you leave work, for exam­ple, and never have to check them at other times. Or if you always open a cer­tain kind of soft­ware and check the queue at cer­tain times of the day, then that’s fine. But if you have to remem­ber to keep check­ing a dozen or more queues all the time, it gets dif­fi­cult. See what you can elim­i­nate or con­sol­i­date. For exam­ple, do you need more than one email inbox? Do you need mul­ti­ple voice­mail inboxes, or even voice­mail at all? Do you need to be a part of 3 dif­fer­ent social net­works? Are there things you rarely use that you can drop? Give this a lit­tle thought over the next few days or cou­ple weeks.

I have also sim­pli­fied my queues into only the most essen­tial ones and with their own sched­ules (i.e. gmail three times a day: early am when I arrive in the office, just after lunch, and just before leav­ing the office; face­book dur­ing those same time slots, the TEDTalks and other Pod­casts dur­ing com­mute times and as an aid to sleep­ing at night; online books (I’m read­ing New­Moon as I’m writ­ing this arti­cle) dur­ing week­ends and lull times.). My to-do list (in a TxtE­dit txt file) I keep open when I’m in the office so I’m con­stantly reminded of what to do next.

2. Self ser­vice. No, this isn’t dirty, you bad reader. Banks and com­pa­nies that sell tick­ets (air­lines, buses, the­aters, etc.) have fig­ured out a way to avoid mas­sive queues: let peo­ple serve them­selves through tech­nol­ogy. So instead of lin­ing up for a teller, there are ATMs every­where. You can buy tick­ets through machines or online. So how do you use this to clear your queues? Fig­ure out what types of requests are con­stantly com­ing at you — through work, even in your per­sonal life, online, etc. — and try to fig­ure out ways you can allow peo­ple to serve them­selves. For exam­ple, are peo­ple always ask­ing you for infor­ma­tion? Post the infor­ma­tion online. Do they need your approval on every­thing? Set up a list of cri­te­ria and allow them to approve things them­selves if the cri­te­ria are met. See if you can auto­mate cer­tain processes. Remove your­self as a bot­tle­neck, and your queues will shorten considerably.

Self ser­vice for me is also about automat­ing many of the tasks I do reg­u­larly. I have tasked all attach­ments I down­load to go straight to the folder marked 1 Inbox instead of me man­u­ally mov­ing it there. I move every­thing that I need to work on at the moment to my MITs (Most Impor­tant Task) folder so I do not have to search for it any­more. I also set up sev­eral fil­ters in my Gmail so the emails that do not need to be found in the inbox do not get sent there and can just be read later on when the time per­mits. I also use a fire­fox add on called Read It Later, which I use to down­load web­site info so I can read it when I’m offline and have more time.

These are lit­tle things we can all do to make life just a lit­tle bit eas­ier and to shave time off from all the search­ing we would have done.

3. Stop at the source. When­ever I get a newslet­ter or other such mass email from a com­pany, I auto­mat­i­cally go to the bot­tom and click the “unsub­scribe” link. It takes a few sec­onds longer than just hit­ting “delete”, but it saves much more time in the long run. I hugely dis­like get­ting my inbox filled up with notices and newslet­ters and ads from com­pa­nies — what a waste of my time hav­ing to sift through them all. So I stop them at the source, so they no longer get sent to me. If there is no easy way to unsub­scribe, I hit the “spam” button.

4. Fil­ter out unnec­es­sary stuff. It takes a minute or two to set up a fil­ter in Gmail (or what­ever email pro­gram you use), but as a result you’ll save a lot of time. If you get cer­tain notices you want to keep on file but don’t need to see in your inbox, fil­ter them out to a label or folder just for those notices. Look at every­thing in your queue to see what you don’t really need to see, and find a way to fil­ter those out. For things like to-do lists, you might use a pro­gram (such as the afore­men­tioned Taskpa­per) that can use labels (such as @today) that you can use to fil­ter out every­thing you don’t need to see today. For exam­ple, when I click on the @today label on my to-do list, it only shows me the three things I plan to do today — not things I want to do later in the week. There are many other tools that can do sim­i­lar things for other queues. For exam­ple, you can use Tweet­deck to sort all the peo­ple you fol­low into groups, so you can fil­ter out every­body but just your actual, real-life friends into one group, or your work col­leagues in another group. If you use a feed reader, you can also set up groups or fold­ers so that you can just check the most essen­tial feeds, instead of hav­ing to sift through every­thing in your unread folder.

5. Pick the most impor­tant. A queue is usu­ally unsorted by pri­or­ity, so that when you make a to-do list, you have things listed in order of when you wrote them down. Your inbox (and most other queues) have the most recent items at the top. But that means you’re going to have to tackle every­thing, which can be over­whelm­ing (and a waste of time) … or it means you’re going to have to con­tin­u­ally scan through the entire queue to pick out the most impor­tant. Instead, find a way to choose the most impor­tant and just focus on those. In email, you might high­light every­thing in your inbox except 5 most impor­tant emails, and move every­thing (except the impor­tant ones) to a “to-read” folder to look through later. Then just deal with those 5 impor­tant emails until your inbox is cleared. Again, with my to-do list, I mark my 3 Most Impor­tant Tasks with an “@today” label so I can focus on just those. With a to-read folder, just pick 3 impor­tant things to read for now (as an example).

6. Clear the rest. Once you’ve picked out the most impor­tant, see if you can clear the rest, or at least shovel them some­where else to deal with at a later time. I’ve already men­tioned how you can do this with your email inbox. With a to-do list, you can put them in an @someday folder/label to deal with later. Delete things you will prob­a­bly never get to, that you’ve been dread­ing doing and don’t absolutely need to do, or that are unnec­es­sary. Some­times a big mass delete can be liberating.

7. Skim. This is a good strat­egy for most queues — instead of try­ing to process the whole thing, just skim and find the impor­tant or inter­est­ing items. For exam­ple, if you use Twit­ter, you know that read­ing every mes­sage from every per­son you fol­low can quickly become a time-consuming (and stress­ful) bur­den. Instead, just skim to see what’s come in, and for­get about the rest. The same applies to a to-read queue (such as Instapa­per or feed reader) — don’t try to read every­thing. Just skim.

8. Let go of the need to get to the end. A lot of the stress that comes from man­ag­ing queues is rooted in a need we seem to have: we want to process every item in the queue and get it to empty. But the nature of queues is that they’re never-ending. You can get your email inbox to empty (and I rec­om­mend it — it’s deeply sat­is­fy­ing), but more emails will soon come in. Don’t stress out about this! Just accept this fact of life. The same comes from a to-read list: don’t try to read every­thing. Enjoy the fact that you have a nice list of things to read — if the queue were emp­tied, what would you do when you’re bored? When we accept this fact — that we’ll never get to the end of our to-do list, and that that’s OK — we can stop stress­ing about our queues. Just man­age them smartly, and deal with the flow as it comes in.