The blog

When you have devel­oped a well-func­tion­ing struc­ture to lean on in your work, your work­ing-meth­ods will have got­ten rather refined. You sort and cat­e­go­rize, put things in fold­ers and assign tags. You label, group and organize.

This helps you to remain focused and to keep track of all the things hap­pen­ing around you, but it also takes time. Not much per­haps, but still. You strive to be as effi­cient as pos­si­ble when doing all the tasks which sim­ply ​”must get done”, in order to give your­self plen­ty of time for the tasks you want to get cre­ative with.

Sim­pli­fy the simplification
Part of what we do is the rea­son why we have cho­sen to work in the par­tic­u­lar line of work that we are in or to live the life we lead. This is exact­ly why time spent doing some­thing else is time not spent doing what you real­ly want and enjoy, even if that which ​”steals” time is our structuring.

So, sim­pli­fy the struc­tur­ing itself.

Do this

1. Take a look at how you cat­e­go­rize your to-do-list.
   • Are you using all categories?
   • Could you remove a whole category?
   • Could you per­haps even stop doing a par­tic­u­lar kind of categorization?
   • Are you no longer in need of tag­ging and label­ing tasks with client’s names, since you nowa­days are care­ful to con­nect tasks with the project they belong to rather than the client?
   • Per­haps you nev­er search for tasks using cat­e­gories at all even if you auto­mat­i­cal­ly assign cat­e­gories to tasks when­ev­er you for­mu­late a to-do-task.


2. If so, then remove the cat­e­go­ry or cat­e­gories which are super­flu­ous, or stop cat­e­go­riz­ing in the man­ner which clear­ly is not ben­e­fi­cial to your structure.


3. Now turn to you e‑mail inbox.
   • Are you sort­ing your e‑mails using an unnec­es­sar­i­ly large num­ber of fold­ers or tags?
   • Could you search for an e‑mail when you need it instead of hav­ing this vast amount of fold­ers and tags?


4. If so, remove fold­ers which are redun­dant and unneed­ed or merge them with oth­er fold­ers, and stop using tags which actu­al­ly are not necessary.


5. Do you have oth­er struc­tur­ing-habits which in all hon­esty do not ben­e­fit you or your work? Reeval­u­ate your habits and decide if you real­ly want to keep all of them.

Keep the num­ber of cat­e­gories down
The cat­e­gories and tags we actu­al­ly use are worth their weight in gold. The rest are just in the way. If you remove or stop using/​doing what is not actu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial to your work, the pro­cess­ing and deal­ing with (the struc­tur­ing) of all incom­ing mate­ri­als et c will require less time and you will have more time for what mat­ters most to you. You will not have to work more than nec­es­sary and can use the extra time you gain to do what pro­vides you and your busi­ness with the great­est utility.

What change did you make?
If you removed some­thing, what was it? Tell me!