Short YouTube talk by Brian Johnson advocating a simple productivity habit: get your email inbox to zero at least once every 24 hours. He argues this frees energy and boosts productivity, and gives five practical steps: raise your standards, commit 100%, one-touch tasks that take under two minutes, make decisions quickly, and just do it.
Chapters
Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian with another video. Today we're going to talk about a quick productivity tip, getting your inbox to zero at least once every 24 hours. This idea of getting your inbox to zero at least once every twenty four hours, along with one touching emails and other tasks that take less than two minutes, form the core of my kind of on the ground creative production strategy and approach. And our team at entheos, we're tiny, but we all embrace these two ideas. And it's amazing what you can get done when things aren't slipping through the cracks because people are. One touching stuff that takes less than two minutes and we're committing to getting our inbox to zero. It's huge. So this is really a super productivity tip. Hope you dig it. Let's look at why this is a good idea. Well, principally, it feels good to know you're on top of stuff and your energy will skyrocket along with your productivity when you actually embrace this. Now, I don't know how many emails you have in your inbox right now, but if you have dozens and dozens or even hundreds, there's a lot of energy that's leaking into uncompleted tasks and that's unbelievably draining. So closing that loop and getting those things taken care of will free up so much energy. So here's how super quick we can obviously talk about this for a weekend. We're going to talk about it for a few minutes. Number one, you need to raise your standards, something David Allen talks a lot about in his GTD Getting Things Done methodology. You've got to know what your standards are and you've got to raise them. If you're comfortable having hundreds of emails in your inbox, well, those are your standards and you're going to slip to those standards. If you demand of yourself and you're excited to engage in the creative challenge of getting your inbox to zero at least once every 24 hours and that becomes your new standard. That's pretty neat. And that's the first point. You've got to start with raise your standards. The second one is you've got to commit. You've got to make 100% commitment. We're going to keep on talking about this. People ask me, how do I create new habits? Well, this is it, really. This is the key. You've got to identify what habit is worth creating. Then you need to make 100% commitment to it. Not a 99.8% commitment, 100% commitment to it. There's a huge difference between 90%, 95%, 99% and 100%. The little whiny voice that wants to negotiate with you goes away when the commitment is truly 100%. So raising your standards, committing 100% and then very practically one touch stuff. If it takes less than two minutes too often, we let things come into our inbox that we look at, that we could address immediately, but we don't. And you do it again and again and again and again. And pretty soon you've got dozens of emails in your inbox. Over days you have hundreds of emails and it's a real pain to go back through and try to get it to zero. But if you moment to moment and email by email, handle things and one touch them, it actually keeps it paradoxically easier to manage all that stuff. So really cool there idea there that we talked about. We have a whole video on how to do that and why to do that. So check that one out. It was maybe a week ago. And then the fourth how is actually probably the most important. It's making decisions. It's the reason why we don't one touch stuff. And this is the number one reason I would say why your inbox is a mess right now. If it is, it's because we avoid making decisions. It's not that something's hard or that it's going to take a long time. It's that we don't want to make a decision. We don't want to disappoint someone by saying no. We're having to renegotiate a commitment or make a commitment they might not be excited about. But we've got to have a deeper yes. We want to get in the habit of flexing our decision muscles. This is a great way to do it. Again, when you have the standard of an inbox to zero one touching stuff that takes less than two minutes, you build the muscle of making decisions rather than avoiding things. And that's a very, very important muscle to build in our lives. And then the fifth how is just do it. No excuses. Now you gotta fall short of times. I certainly have over the last six weeks with our little man. And I haven't gotten my inbox to zero every 24 hours, but I still get it there nearly every day and it's huge. So we won't necessarily get there every single day, but we want to make it our commitment and go for it. Then when you fall short, you know you can get back to it really quickly. Super powerful. There you go. Productivity tip. Get your inbox to zero at least once every 24 hours. Why? It feels good. Your energy will surge along with your productivity. Keys are raise your standards, commit 100%. If something takes less than two minutes, one touch it, make decisions and then just do it. There you go. Let me know what you think. If you have any other productivity stuff you want me to riff on and if you liked it, go ahead and implement it. Hope you enjoyed. Hope you got something meaningful out of that. Have another awesome day. See ya.
