Needs title - something about making decisions?

The new techniques I’ve been using to keep myself organized have one key feature in common: if you allow something to occupy your attention, you make a decision about what to do with it.

This means if you read an email, you decide whether you need to keep it and whether it needs a reply, even if you choose not to reply straight away. If you pick a piece of paper off the floor, you either decide where it goes and put it there or you dump it in a dedicated ‘inbox’ until it’s time to pay attention to it. What you don’t do is pluck something from your inbox, look it over, and put it straight back in your inbox because you don’t feel like deciding what to do with it after all.

Once in this habit, I realized how ridiculous my habits were when looking over my drafts.

“Perhaps remove this.”

“‘But’ rather than ‘and’?”

“Is this clear?”

All these little notes-to-self really said just one thing: “I didn’t bother to actually think about this.” When the time came to turn those annotations into an actual change in my work, my workflow went:

1. Refamiliarise myself with the problem I was trying to solve.
2. Work out how to solve it.
3. Solve it.

when it should have gone:

1. Do what it says in the annotation.

So, from now on, a new rule for redrafting: every annotation must be actionable. Otherwise, I might as well write “Redraft this” on the front page and have done with it.