A guest column by Christiane Mühmel, Raum und Zeit, Ulm
How do you actually manage your inbox?
Are you also a “tower-stacker” (someone who has the knack for piling up papers and documents into extremely tall stacks) or more of a “multi-stacker” (someone who tends to make many smaller stacks, so that you can only glimpse the desk’s original color in a few spots)?
Where does your mail actually end up? By that I mean all the documents, CDs, magazines, etc., that someone wants to give you—whether it’s your boss, a coworker, or actually the mail service.
It sounds trivial, but simply setting up a real “inbox”—in the form of a tray with a clear label—often works wonders. If you also coordinate this with all your “mail carriers,” you can prevent having to search for new mail in all sorts of unlikely places (e.g., on the keyboard, right on the chair, under the table, etc.) in the future.
After all, you’ve surely installed a mailbox at home for your mail carrier—or would you find it more exciting to search for letters every day under the doormat, in the yard, or behind the rain gutter?
We often do something similar when sorting through incoming mail at the office. And what’s even worse, we handle our incoming mail in a very strange way:
For example, we take various documents from the stack—but anything that doesn’t interest us at the moment, anything we don’t want to make a decision about, and anything we don’t have time for, we simply put right back! At best, we put them on a new stack; at worst, we put them back with the “unreviewed documents.”
Do you do that at home, too? For example, if you don’t want to pay a bill, do you put it back in the mailbox? Of course not! So why do we often make life so difficult for ourselves at work?
So:
- empty the inbox every day
- Handle everything right away that takes less than 5 minutes
- Assign everything else to projects or other tasks and then process them accordingly
- And most importantly: NEVER—absolutely NEVER—put anything back again!!!
Christiane Mühmel
Space and Time
Phone: 0731-380 56 67
