In yesterday’s post I left you with a cliff-hanger:
The process of getting to the stage of being able to do everything consists of one thing and one thing only.
That one thing is… (to be continued)
… to get rid of all backlogs.
You don’t stand a chance of doing everything that you want to do if you have backlogs.
Any backlogs at all.
Remember I’m only talking about getting to the stage of being able to do everything. If you want to do everything then you must go through the stage of getting rid of all your backlogs.
Another way of looking at this is that you must stop pushing present work forward into the future. I don’t mean work which belongs in the future - that isn’t the problem. I’m talking about current work which you are not dealing with currently. It’s very similar to getting into debt.
This is not just a question of catching up with a backlog, it also means keeping it at “inbox zero” once you’ve caught up.
To put it in financial terms, once you’ve paid off debt and balanced the budget, then you have a sound financial basis on which to expand.
As I’ve said frequently recently the best way to get rid of backlogs and keep at “inbox zero” is to use a no-list system.