Do you feel like you're drowning in various communication systems and to-dos? Below are three tips for managing these areas.

Default notifications to OFF

Other than “an individual person reached out to me, privately”, your default for notifications should be off. The first thing I always did on a new machine was go in and turn off email notifications, pop ups, and all sounds for Outlook. Whenever I joined a new channel on Teams, Slack, or Discord, I muted it. If you’re feeling hesitant to do this, commit to try it for a week and see how it goes. You’ll be surprised by how little you miss – remember, being overwhelmed means you’re likely missing things too.

Check for messages intentionally: You get the 10 minutes while you’re waiting for a meeting to start (when people are invariably running late) to check Slack or Teams, and those annoying half hours between two meetings to scan your email for files. If that’s not enough, schedule a time to do more processing. (If you can’t find time to do that, you likely need to do some schedule wrangling.)

Scanning is different than processing

I wrote a rule to put all mail directly “to” me in a single folder. Once there, my rules were (cribbed heavily from the book Getting Things Done):

• If it can be done in 5 minutes, do it.
• If it can be delegated, do that now.
• If it’s something that requires reading carefully, thinking before responding, or a longer meeting or work prior to doing it, put it on my “to do” list with a clear next action. Clear next actions always start with a verb, and preferably not the phrase “think about” (since it’s not clear when you’re done with that).

Example clear next actions

Some example next actions are:

• Talk to so-and-so about X
• Schedule a meeting to decide Y
• Draft response to Z

Want more tips on managing an overflowing to-do list? See this video for managing to-dos and email.

Leave time for actual tasks

I had standing blocks on my schedule a few times a week to do actual work, as well as scheduling specific things I needed to do. During those times, I’d look at my to-do list for items I could pick off today, things that had been on there so long I just needed to drop them (and see if they came back around), or things that I hadn’t done and probably needed to schedule time on my calendar to get done.

What next?

Want some personalized assistance getting your organizational “noise” under control? Learn more about SelfWitte’s coaching services, or send an email to Coaching@SelfWitte.com to schedule an appointment.