Like most people, I check my primary inbox fairly frequently. I also have a secondary inbox that I use for a few other things. I check that reasonably often too. When I check, I deal with anything that is urgent or (let’s admit it) fun.
However, sometimes there are things that need to be looked at and dealt with eventually, but don’t need to be done right that minute. We’re talking filling in the Google form a coach sent out, or checking a new school calendar of events that’s been sent from the HSA, or buying pretzels for upcoming half days at the elementary school, or filling out a survey for a work project, or signing a form or…Many things.
I tend to let these pile up and then deal with them every few days during a batch processing time. Friday is a good time for this. I sometimes do a mid-week email triage as well.
On Friday the 4th, however, the kids were out of school and while I was working that day, it was a short day. So it didn’t happen. Then last week I was in Portland and I wasn’t really building in email processing time so even more stuff piled up. I got home late Friday afternoon and immediately went into picking up kids various places.
On Saturday my husband took the older four kids white water rafting (!) and we had a sitter for a while for the 4-year-old, so I seized the opportunity to sit down and deal with the mess of the previous two weeks. Since I track my time, I also know how long this took me: 2.5 hours to get to current.
Now, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair as a count as I spent a reasonable chunk of time on an advertiser survey that was pretty thorough. But I guess every week brings *something* that has to be filled out. So maybe it is an accurate reading of the stuff from the last two weeks.
Two and a half hours seems like a long time but I also imagine that if I’d dealt with all those things in the moment, they would have taken a lot longer than 2.5 hours because I’d be going in and out of things. So I think batching is the way to go, even if it’s not necessarily the most fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Do you batch process email and the tasks that land in your inbox?
Speaking of batching…we are failing on this on the grocery front. There is a rather nice grocery store (McCaffrey’s, for any grocery store experts…) that is approximately a 4 minute drive from the house. This opened a year ago and as a result we don’t wind up thinking too much about what we need because it’s so easy just to stop by. But the net result is that my husband went to a different grocery store (Wegman’s) Friday night (after seeing Beetlejuice with our daughter) and bought some stuff, and then I went on Saturday to the local one to get some more groceries for the week…and then I realized we didn’t have stuff for hamburgers on Sunday night (a frequent choice) so I went back Sunday afternoon…and then got home and realized we didn’t have hot dogs (which we *always* have since we buy from Costco usually…but I guess some kid developed a real hankering for them?). Our nanny will likely get hot dogs and some other things today but she is more rationally making a list from looking at the pantry…
In other news: It’s definitely looking like fall around here! If you’re looking for a fall read, the first half of my novel, The Cortlandt Boys, takes place in a cozy small town in the Poconos during autumn. This remains my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Please give it a read! Or if you’d like a little time management in your fiction, Juliet’s School of Possibilities takes place in October in a place much like Cape May, NJ. You can learn more about this fable here.
Yes, I batch process email and my LinkedIn inbox for the majority of my days. They can take from 15 minutes to 1 hour per day. The time it takes me to finish a specific task that comes into my email inbox or my LinkedIn inbox can vary depending on the task.
I think that if you write 1 blog post about each of the Tranquility-by-Tuesday principles, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, you can write 9 blog posts. This looks like not a huge, but decent number of blog posts to me.
Also, Ms. Laura Vanderkam, I was unable to make the connection between the thumbnail image of this blog post and what you wrote about in this blog post. That tells me that it could be a random image from an image archive of yours that you’ve maintained over the years.
@Yukun – I often just illustrate posts with random pretty pictures!
Back yourself Laura and self-publish The Cortlandt Boys. I loved it but paperbacks are much easier to press into people’s hands than e-books.
@Hayley – I might – perhaps on the list for the new year 🙂