Here are some more ways to reverse chunk… and a word of warning.
Mail is a pain. If you haven’t noticed, they seem to bring more of it almost every day. And, unless it is your birthday or anniversary, probably none of it is any good. I know I promised pithy, real life tips, but I’m going to squeeze in one really important concept here. Dealing with your mail is actually a pretty small task. It is really important to logistically and psychologically differentiate between dealing with the mail, and dealing with the tasks that are generated by opening your mail.
If you want to know more about task management… you are going to have to hire me to teach you how to keep A Bad-Ass To Do List, or wait for me to finish my book, with that title. But, maybe you do have a system for task management. If so, why do you need to open your mail every day? Or feel bad for letting it pile up for a LITTLE while? I do think there is a value in triaging you mail daily. I generally look through it quickly to filter out the obvious junk mail to the recycling bin(s), pull out the ultra rare item that looks really important, and separate mine from my wife’s. This generally take almost no attention or EF and about 30 seconds of my life. And, honestly, once you separate the wheat from the chaff, there really isn’t that much. Certainly not enough to feel anxious about dealing with. Then I actually open the mail about every 10 days. I can’t think of the last time that I had an issue because something sat in my inbox for a week. Snail mail is rarely urgent.
Two for one today. Let’s talk paperwork. I am almost 46 years old. I have never paid a bill and filed right away in my entire life. But I’ve got a system for that. A system that epitomized the idea of reverse chunking. I have a few stacking “inboxes” on my side desk. Paperwork that has been dealt with but needs to be kept and filed goes in there. It started as one inbox about 25 years ago. But now there is one for personal, one for work, one for the rental property, one for stuff for my bookkeeper, and one for notes on my book. But my life is a bit complicated.
But the important takeaway is that it is already enough effort to expend to deal with whatever task those papers represent. I don’t have it in me to then fire up my EF powers to file everything. So I reverse chunk that task and file everything every few months.
But here is the promised word of warning. You have to find the sweet spot of how long an interval you use for these tasks. If you let it go too long, you may end up setting yourself up with a project that feels too big to attack. Until you get the hang of it I suggest either setting a reminder for every so often, check in with yourself and add things like mail or filing to you To Do List when you feel just the slightest him of worry that it has been too long or the “pile” is too high, and that you time yourself when doing these tasks. Most tasks that feel big, aren’t nearly as big as they seem when we know how long they actually take. More on that next week.
