Get Everything Done

Most of my backlogs are of things that only take a few minutes work, but I put them aside at the time. Often, I planned to batch them, or wasn't quite sure how to deal with them at the time, or just didn't feel like it.

I made a list of all of them, and assigned priorities (based on age and how much the pile's existence is annoying me). The piles started with about 50 tasks each, very roughly. That's 2 weeks of email (eeps), a season's worth of low-urgency inbasket, a year's worth of financial papers.

Each day, I deal with each pile in turn (starting with the most annoying) and reduce it by 10%. For papers, I do the oldest in the pile. For things that I can easily count, I use randomizer to pick which tasks I work on. If the chosen task is part of something larger, such as a conversation, I do the whole thing, and it all counts towards the 10%.

So far, so good. The large piles have many quick things in them, so 10% is reasonable. Often they're things that need a final note or two now that the project is finished. Impossible at the time, but now quick. Sometimes they're parts of a conversation that's now finished. Sometimes they're things I wanted to think about for a bit.

Large pile shrink satisfyingly quickly with this method.

Smaller piles tend to have larger tasks in them, so 10% of the small pile is also reasonable.

This method also gives me variety. Some old email. Some more-current email. Some of this season's papers. Some of the basket of awkward things from the backlog I declared two years ago. Some simple sorting and stapling of bank statements.

It's been a week, and I'm happy with it.

Yes, I try to reduce each pile by 10% each day, usually in a single sitting. Yesterday, an early roll landed on a big, much-delayed project that I stayed with until it was done, so didn't get to the other piles.

Using the 10% rule, 300 emails will be reduced to nothing in 38 days.

I actually round down, unless that would give me zero. Often enough, though, dealing with one email means dealing with a conversation, so I do more than the goal. 10% is based on start of day, not the original size.

That 38 days is pessimistic, since often a conversation will take me past the day's goal. Also, because it's several small piles, each one gets down to the "at least one" size faster. I've reduced two email batches to zero so far. I expected the final emails to be nasty but they turned out to be very easy. Maybe the nasty projects get lots of correspondence, so got picked earlier?