When you receive an email, you have four options: delete, transfer to your to-do list, transfer to your calendar, or respond. Unfortunately, most of us find a fifth: ignoring it. We have a pile of un-dealt with emails, and we’re overwhelmed by them every time we check. If we can just get to the point of a zero-email inbox, however, it’s far easier to maintain it than create it. Reading a productivity book or going to a seminar can be just the impetus needed to delete all those emails, even though most of us are perfectly aware beforehand that we’d be better off if we dealt with our backlog.

I usually find productivity books collections of fairly obvious points (see my last post), and this one is no exception. Still, I think there is still a benefit to reading them. Doing so forces you to think about your own productivity and practices: even when you could have thought of the suggestions on your own, most of us don’t spend any time on it, and so don’t. Even if you’ve already got some successful techniques, there’s also always room for tweaking. I already, for example, sort my life into broad projects and themes, with individual action items for each project filed separately. What I don’t do is set up milestones for each project, to help me track how each one is going and give me a little boost each time I get there. Seems like a good idea though: I think I’ll try it.

Allcott’s central message is that we need to work through a process of Collect – Organize – Review – Do in our lives: we gather tasks and goals, we organize them, we review the information we’ve gathered and find what we’ve missed, and then we do the tasks. David Allen, the productivity guru, has a similar system. Overall, I’d say if want a productivity book, this is a fine choice: nothing special, but not bad either. Still, I’d recommend you start with the Tao Te Ching or Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: the original self help books!