Artist’s Productivity: The Empty Inbox

by Joel Falconer

Artists suck at productivity.

It’s a bitter pill for some of you, and a badge of pride for others. And then there’s the rare artist who gets things done.

I know the feeling myself; it once took me two years to write a review of a book.

When we launched the Free Articulator’s New Look I freed up a lot of the time I have allotted for this site, so I resolved to spend some of that time teaching other artists the things I’ve learned to get things done consistently.

I learned this the hard way. And it took a long time.

If you already have problems with productivity, chances are you’ll have a hard time learning too - the very problem you try to fix is going to be your worst enemy in fixing it.

If you’re interested in being able to:

• Complete projects consistently
• Reliably estimate the length of time until project completion
• End up with products to sell instead of dreams always unfulfilled

Then follow along with me for the rest of the series. This first article will look at the strategy of the empty inbox, and how I do it.

It’s a brand new year and I’m picking up some new habits to make it a good one; while I do that I’ll let you in on some of the methods I’ve been able to polish and really make work for me.

If you spend a lot of time - like most writers, artists and probably you if you’re reading this - working with or on the web and email, then you’ve got to be able to handle your communications with ease. For many people, communications is a black hole where perfectly good productive time is thrown away.

Define a time to communicate

Until recently I had the terrible habit of leaving my email open all day, every day (and all night, every night). I didn’t realize how much time I was losing because of it, since most of my tasks were still getting completed promptly.

Give yourself a time to deal with email each day. It could be the first thing you do when you start working for the day, or perhaps you’d like to save it until the end of the day. Regardless of when you do it, define a time. While you’re in work time, stick to it. What you do in personal time is your business.

Don’t skip days, either - if you implement this idea it will mean some people have to wait a bit longer until they receive a reply, so it can get annoying if you skip days. On the flip side, don’t succumb to the trap of checking email all the time because ‘it could be important’ - if it’s important enough, they’ll be able to contact you other ways.

It’s not a bad idea to keep Skype open all the time, if you can trust yourself not to spend the day engaged in personal conversation and ignoring the real work.

Email and other forms of electronic communication can be a time-killer, but communications are used to achieve a goal and coordinate, so they are important. It’s important to spend time with this area of your life and do it properly and regularly. But when was the last time you lost billable hours getting carried away on the phone or with instant messaging? Or how about on that Facebook profile? And what about reading and replying to the most ineffective of emails?

Communications are used to achieve a goal

How do we best facilitate this use of email? We turn the communication into an action:

• If the goal is further communication, reply then and there (assuming that you are checking your email in your allotted email time). Move the email to the appropriate archive folder.
• If the goal is to do something, turn it into a non-communicative action using task management, then move the email to the appropriate archive folder.

If the email doesn’t fall into one of those categories, then it’s probably an informative item - the best thing you can do is evaluate the importance of the piece before deciding whether to read it or not. Don’t automatically read everything you receive - that Britney Spears commentary from the blog you subscribed to by email should probably wait until you’ve finished the work day and you’re in personal time.

Moving and sorting email

Many productivity experts recommend deleting old email, but do so wisely. It can be the memory for those things you don’t care to remember, and this is more important than it sounds. Legal problems? If you’re an editor like me, what if you’ve forgotten which writer sent those articles with missing bylines four years ago? The answer is sorting.

With Gmail, you can label your emails. The beauty of this system is that one email can be sorted by various labels, whereas in the traditional email system, you’ve got no choice but to put one email in one folder and hope you made the right choice.

If you use Gmail, create a system of labels that suit your life and categorize the various types of email you get; when you are done dealing with a message label it straight away and press Archive. You can still access it through All Mail and the labels.

If you’re not using a system with the power of Gmail, set up some folders and simply move your messages there when you’re done. It still works well enough to do the job.

Note: if you love Gmail but don’t want to part with the professionalism of using an email address with your own domain, check out Google Apps.

Creating actions

The next immediate step is to create actions. Tip: I’ve seen people archive their email before going on to create the task - while it may seem pretty obvious, create the task first and then archive the message. You’ll forget so many tasks it’s not funny.

Creating actions is done through task management software. Yours might be paper.

Everyone has a different system; I’ve played with services like Remember The Milk which is very, very nice, and I might use it more as I become more reliant on web apps for added portability. In the meantime, I’m happy with my current system: Anxiety with iCal. It’s simple and effective - we’re talking about task management, not project management, remember.

iCal provides me with the hub for my tasks when I need to manage their schedules, add notes, or remove them from the system. Anxiety is beautifully unobtrusive - never seen when you don’t need it, and never more than a second away when you do. Switching between iCal and email is awkward, but having that little box there at a flick of the finger is not. It’s the perfect partner for OS X inbox emptying.

From what I’ve been told, Rainlendar is one of the best simple task managers for Windows.

When Anxiety becomes compatible with Remember The Milk or a similar desktop application for Remember The Milk becomes available, I’d prefer that - but I like my desktop integration too much to jump ship yet.

Why is the empty inbox important?

It reduces bloat. It obliterates clutter. That’s important to getting things done; your inbox is there as a repository for incoming, unprocessed items from other people. If you wake up to a collection of read and unread items from the past few days, weeks or even months in your inbox, you might be able to get through the day - but if you keep it empty, you’ll begin with razor-sharp precision.

Keeping your inbox empty allows you to get up, deal with communications, and move on with the day. This is the first step for the productivity-challenged artist to finishing a book, recording that album or designing the new client’s website: guarding against time-drains.

Where do we go now?

If you can't wait for more, explore the archives sorted by month via the links in the right-hand sidebar, or use the Category links in the same place.

If you'd rather we did all the hard work, you're in luck. Here's a list of articles that are related to this one:

• Artist’s Productivity: Information Processing
• I’ve got a message for you
• The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Nineteen - Observe and confront life
• The Points of the Creative Artists’ Code: Twenty-four - You are not the viewpoint
• News Flash — Allforart Takes Immediate Action to Protect Creative Artist in Copyright Infringement Case