A favorite GTD rule of mine is the 2-minute rule.

The basic thought is if a task or activity can be completed in under two minutes, do it right away.

Otherwise, store it somewhere or delegate it or do it another time.

How often have you opened the email and looked at it for thee 5th time?

What is the mental space that task takes up? I’d bet it’s more than the time it takes to solve the problem and be done with it.

Once a week I get on a skype screen-share with my ops manager and we clear out my inbox. For me inbox 12 or below is my inbox zero. It is amazing how much you can do and clear out in an hour. All the crusty things that we can say, doesn’t matter or need response, all the stuff that needs to be bounced gets bounced and I can go into the rest of the week with a reset.  Virtually everything in there takes less than 2 minutes to handle.

The truth is, I don’t think that my ops manager is even focused half the time, but if they are, they will see me getting it all done.