In their book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, authors Roy Baumeister and John Tierney frequently repeat their advice to just make just one or two difficult resolutions at a time. Most of us overestimate our willpower. We go nuts on New Year's Eve and commit to a list of life changing new habits, effective immediately. We give up most or all of them quickly because a person with the willpower to make this many changes as once is as rare as a person with the muscle power to lift a car.
The authors say that willpower IS a muscle. It strengthens with exercise. But it's best to focus on one new habit at a time. Once the habit is established, it becomes automatic. You don't need any more willpower to decide to behave this way. There is no temptation to resist. It just becomes something you do without thinking.
My willpower workout for the last two months was to shrink my e-mail inbox at work. My goal was to stop having tons of emails in my inbox for months that I hope to react to some time. Seems easy, but I glance over the shoulders of everyone else at work and see that their inboxes, too, usually contain hundreds of e-mails. Why? I get an email asking me to do something, but it isn't an urgent priority and I know it will take time. So I leave it in the inbox thinking I might get to it later or the urgency will suddenly grow and I'll be glad I didn't delete it. I've got enough projects in enough areas and working with a wide array of people and departments to make this strategy dangerous. It isn't long before the inbox is cluttered with hundreds of things that I think I may have to deal with sometime but not sure how. As David Allen talks about in his "Getting Things Done" time management system, all this vague "stuff" in the inbox creates a gnawing anxiety that there are things I should be doing that I'm not. And this "stuff" creates rework because every time I review one of these old messages to see if I think it's finally time to deal with it, I have to repeat the mental work again of thinking, "What is this about again? If I wanted to react, what action would I take? How long will that action take and is it worth stopping other work to attend to this right now?" All too often, the outcome of all this mental work is a decision that it's just not worth doing right now, but this guarantees I'll be repeating the whole mental exercise.
The core of David Allen's method is to drive all inboxes--email and physical--to zero almost every day. The inbox contains unprocessed "stuff". The goal is to process every email and then get it out of the inbox. You send some emails go to Trash. You send others to a Reference folder if you don't need to do anything but might eventually need to retrieve information that is in the email. If you can respond to an email in less than 2 minutes, Allen suggests you do respond immediately, then trash it.
The toughest emails to process are those that require action and the action is not worth doing right now. For these, you need a place (I use a Word document) to document all plans for all projects that you are accountable for, short and long term. It might be an action you will delegate to someone else. It might be one you will do yourself. But as soon as you've captured the action, get the email out of the inbox. Archive it for whenever you decide to do the action.
At this point, the inbox is back to zero and I find myself feeling much clearer and more relaxed. It took 2 months of willpower to get here, to break 20+ years of habitually cluttered email, but I think the feelings of an empty inbox are so satisfying, I'll be able to maintain this new habit. Time to move on to my next willpower workout.
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