Which scares us more:
- Missing something, or
- Not devoting enough time to the important things.
To explore this question, here’s a short parable of modern work life: how I manage my Inbox.
Starting 15 years ago, I established my current approach to my Inbox. It is based on the philosophy that there are two kinds of emails:
- Ones I need to act on
- Ones I don’t need to act on
The approach is brutally simple:
- The first group is unread
- The second is read.
No filing of any kind. Search works great. Zero inbox is meaningless; zero unreads is not. Voila!
This approach, plus ruthless use of the “mark as spam / block sender” functionality in my Gmail interface, has served me well for years.
Last week, for the first time in ages, I decided I needed to adjust my system.
I think it’s because of an explosion of workflow-related emails: Calendar updates, Calendly updates, Zoom meeting updates, Docusign updates, Box updates, AI recording updates, etc.
Combine this with the general flotsam of subscriptions of varying degrees of usefulness, and the ratio of must read:optional to read emails in my Inbox had gotten out of whack.
My solution to this is that I caved in to using filters in Gmail (I’m sure there are many better solutions (Superhuman, etc.).
What’s interesting is the experience of setting up those filters: it’s the task of taking every nonessential but interesting email and putting it somewhere other than my Inbox—the only part of my email world that I’ve looked at consistently for more than a decade.
The feeling is the same one I have when there’s an “internal meeting I could join but maybe don’t have to join.” You know the one: the content is important, you will probably learn something and maybe will make the meeting a little better. But do you absolutely need to be there?
The same goes for the Slack channel that’s been there forever that I rarely read; the client call that might be helpful to join even though someone else is running the meeting; the conference that I always attend, even though I can’t show concrete business results.
Most of us feel short on time—including time to be unproductive. We ache for open space, time to be generative, time to do the things that matter most… “once all this stuff is out of the way.” We tell ourselves that there’s no real way to create this kind of space.
One way to explore if this is true is to experience the fear of missing something: that essential email, that meeting where a wrong decision gets made, that photo op at the conference….
Perhaps that fear is justified, and the consequences would be significant.. Maybe success is defined by you getting to everything right on time; you being present to optimize each and every decision; you seeing all the edge cases and fixing them immediately. That might be what we need most from you.
Or it might be that there’s more resilience in the system than you expect.
That the cost of tracking and sifting through everything is real.
That setting a different bar for “what requires me” would create such a seismic, structural shift in your days and your weeks that it would be a little bit, or even a lot, disorienting.
This is what the sixth stage of Kevin Kelly is all about: “finding those things to which you are uniquely suited, and doing only those things.”
Not the places you can add value, not the things you are best at. The things that only you can do.
It’s a really high bar, and it cuts against the culture in most organizations.
It’s also worth exploring.