The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (Spring 2013)
I initially read this book back when I was experiencing work overload for the first time. What had been a fairly mundane 9-5 routine was slowly expanding into a 730am - 545pm workday. I made my manager aware of the problem and he responded nobly by becoming unusually difficult to reach. Clearly, my inflated hours were the new norm and I wasn’t going to get much outside help to reverse the trend. If the strain was going to ease anytime soon, it would require some ingenuity with how I approached my work.
The application of Ferris's 'batching' strategy was the big breakthrough for me. Batching means doing similar tasks together so that setup steps are not repeated. Or, to put it another way, batching eliminated the time used when switching from one task to the other. The 4-Hour Workweek used workplace email as one of its examples for how batching worked in the real world. This was convenient for me because my inbox was quickly becoming my most time consuming problem (1).
The way I applied batching to email required that I change my decision criteria for responding. Instead of replying to an email when I was ready to reply, I started replying when waiting was no longer a reasonable option. In the context of my role and the company I worked for, this meant waiting between one and two full days to respond.
This small change made a big difference. Waiting a full day cut down on the 'instant messaging' that cluttered my inbox (and often created more confusion than clarity). It gave me time to collect more information before responding and allowed me to revise my initial response if I came up with a better thought during the day. Sometimes, enough similar emails would come in during my waiting period and I would answer all of these emails at once. Most importantly, the batching mentality allowed me to take responsibility for my own failings and set the course for my improvement as a communicator.
My inbox battle would run for a couple of years after I returned this book to the library. But knowing that I was going to determine the absolute minimum frequency with which I would respond to my inbox was a crucial step. Slowly, I stopped wasting my own time by over-responding to email and found I could fit my expanding set of responsibilities into a more reasonable daily work schedule.
Footnotes / the organized one speaks
0. Just saying…
This book also opened my thinking to the limits imposed by domain dependence. Batching as described above isn’t all that complicated and most people do a form of it in one way or another. When I first read The 4-Hour Workweek, I used to grocery shop once a week because I knew daily shopping would add a lot of extra commuting time to my supermarket trips. I didn’t think of this as batching – I just thought of it as obvious.
But it wasn’t so obvious that I could readily extend the logic to how I opened my email inbox. I've seen a similar sort of thing fairly often over these past few years. A lot of people are capable of brilliant new ideas or creative solutions to existing problems once they are able to link their problems to an area that they already understand. The challenge in life isn’t coming up with lots of brilliant ideas - the challenge is applying the one or two brilliant ideas you've already had in a new context.
In its own way, this book challenged me to look for the universal truths that linked otherwise unrelated topics. It forced me to challenge my own assumptions about what it means to truly understand something. Instead of worrying about all the details (which have a nasty habit of changing at the most inconvenient time, anyway) I started to concern myself more with basic principles, natural rhythms, and universal truths.
1. It ain’t me, man, it’s you, and him, and her, and them, and…
Back then, I approached my inbox like everybody else – with a process devoid of any thought process or impulse control. I logged in whenever I felt the urge and responded to the most urgent messages until I thought of something else to do. Occasionally, I 'organized' my inbox by color-coding notes or recklessly creating folder after folder. Every once in a while, I deleted a bunch of long-ignored messages and hoped not to suffer any consequences for my sloth.
At no point did I make any real effort to evaluate my process and organize my daily approach. And it never crossed my mind that I was the prime culprit for my inbox problem – I took it for a given that I was The Organized One. If you had asked me at the time, reader, to describe why my inbox was such a mess, I would have explained that everything except me – the workplace culture, our clients, my colleagues, the ever-present Powers That Be – was to blame for the incoherent digital mess I dealt with each day.
