Unless you read, respond to, pass on, or dispose of everything that comes your way, you accumulate stuff.
Prolonging dealing with it creates a mound of stuff that you eventually become inundated with, at which time you will do one of two things.
- Put it in a box labeled with the date for future reference or
- Throw it away or delete it from your Inbox or hard drive.
Either way, you end up doing nothing with it. Since that final result is doing nothing, why not delete it right away? I figure you can’t do that, so that is why you save it. This seems to create a nonsensical vicious circle.
Discarding this stuff immediately will save you time in the future. You won’t spend time moving it around, touching it, thinking about it, wondering whether you will have time to take care of it. And you won’t feel discomfort looking at it or knowing that you’re falling further behind keeping on top of your stuff. One way to rationalize this is that periodically going over this stuff may ignite ideas – therefore justifying its value and usefulness to you.
I know it is all good stuff; otherwise, why would you keep it? The really good stuff gets taken care of right away. The just good stuff is saved. How good is it really if you never get to look at it? It would be taken care of right away if it were truly important. If it is not truly important, why bother with it at all?
I don’t know what you will be doing about this, but I will be printing this blog and will put it with the stuff I am saving to remind me what to do with it when I get around to it, and then someday, I’ll probably discard the printed copy of this blog with the stuff I put it with.
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