My New Productivity System: Doing It

If you know anything about me you know that I am a list person. I love a list. In fact for many years I have managed my job responsibilities through a system of lists and notebooks. I also love a notebook. This has been my productivity system. Well, that and my inbox. Any email that needs to be tended to must either be 'popped out' of my inbox or marked as unread. If not I will never remember to respond to it or to address the issues outlined in it. I blame Gmail-induced unread email blindess for this. And when you think about it, unread emails are really their own list. So I've typically got 1-2 physical lists going, plus my inbox list and 2-3 notebooks with notes from meeting, phone calls, conferences etc, all informing me on what I should do next. 

But then something bad happened. I started to find myself paralyzed by my own lists. Sometimes I would spend several hours organizing and reorganizing my to-do list only to find that it was time to go home and I hadn't even to-done anything. My lists and notebooks were failing me. They weren't just failing me, they were burying me. I needed a new approach. Finally I remembered something my friend Michelle said to me when we were on a business trip together and she was working and I was making lists. She said they she'd found that she had to just skip the list and actually do things if she wanted to get anything done.

This concept made me pretty nervous when she told me about it initially. Pssshhaw I thought to myself. How will you know what you've done if you don't have a list? I mean, right? But after a few days of hardly accomplishing anything besides managing my productivity management system I decided it was time to reassess the situation. One morning, I poured myself a big cup of courage-inducing coffee and just starting answering emails. To assuage my obsessive need for note-taking, I allowed myself to make note of what I was accomplishing as I was moving forward but not to make a note of something to do later. Instead I forced myself to do right then the things that I was about to write down to do later. 

At the end of the day I was amazed at how much I had accomplished. I was chagrinned even at what a crutch my lists had become for me. A way to put-off doing things without feeling like I was putting things off. I'd tricked myself into guilt-free procrastination without even knowing it. And while I constantly have to fight my ingrained list-creation-response, I find that I have never been more productive than when I am actually doing things rather than writing about doing things. Who would have thought.

Take Back Your Inbox!

I talk a lot to small businesses about how important it is to double-opt-in subscribers to their list. In fact, at MailChimp we recently found (via data from our Email Genome Project) that lists that were double-opted-in had 75% higher open rates and 114% higher click rates. If you're running a small business you don't want people on your list who didn't sign up or who don't want to receive your email. It's a waste of everyone's time and damages their perception of you and your brand.

But there's another side of this equation that we, as people providing tools and advice for marketing small businesses, never address. When businesses follow the best practice of double-opting-in their list, they're trusting that you will only signup if you really want to receive their content. They're trusting that you place a certain amount of value on your email address. The same amount of value that they place on it. By double-opting you in to their list they are saying that they respect your time and the state of your email inbox and they are assuming that you do too. They are assuming that you don't opt-in for emails you don't want to receive. They are assuming that you don't allow companies to send you email that you don't want and thus your inbox is in such a state that you have time and space to look at the content you actually did sign up for.

So this brings me to my new proposal to all of us as inbox owners: Take Back Your Inbox! Don't allow people to send you email you didn't sign up for. Don't continue to receive emails you no longer read. It only takes a few minutes each morning to unsubscribe from emails you no longer want to receive. When you simply delete your unwanted email each day its like stopping up your ears because the radio is too loud instead of turning down the radio. TURN DOWN THE RADIO! 

You are in control of where your email address goes and what kind of content you allow to be sent to your inbox. Take control of the stress you feel when you have 25, 50, 100 unread emails. If we want to encourage businesses to respect us and how they send us email (and reward those who do actually respect whether we've opted-in), we have to stop allowing them to automatically sign us up when we purchase from them or when we put our business cards in fish bowls or when we subscribe to another list and that business sells our information.

Create an inbox that contains only information that's really useful to you (not counting the chain-mail your grandma sends of course - not much to do about that). Be judicious when you subscribe to things or give out your email address. Be shameless in unsubscribing from content that no longer applies to you (you can always resubscribe later). Let's hold businesses accountable for respecting opt-in and opt-out and let's reward those that already do.