Something else that is a major issue for most people, number three, have you ever heard you should handle a piece of paper or correspondence only one time? Or you should only go to the internet file one time? Or if someone sent you an email, read it only one time, and don’t waste your time by having to come back and go over it again later before you respond to it?
Because if someone sent you an email and you think, “I don’t want to think about this right now. I’ll just deal with it later.” And you set it aside and then you have to go back and read it again. Did you just waste 30 seconds, one or two minutes, or more? Yeah, absolutely. And that took a chunk out of that hour of time that you can gain.
When something crosses your desk to read, use a wastebasket or a delete key. You need to ask yourself this question, “If I didn’t read this email, if I didn’t read this report, if I didn’t read this letter—would there be any negative consequences?” If there are, then do something about it. Take care of it, take action, make your decision, and move forward. If not, get it off your desk. Put it in the garbage, delete it, get rid of it. This going back to things later is a huge time waster. Break the habit of handling the information more than one time.
Decide how important the information is and handle it once. In a period of months you will save hours or even days of time just doing this alone. Eighty percent of the papers that are filed are never used or never looked at again. Have you filed something and not looked at it for five or six years? Almost everyone does.
You need to think about this, what would happen if you couldn’t find that piece of paper? Is there another place you could get that information? Could you dig up similar information somewhere else? What would be the negative consequence of not being able to have that right here, right now?
If the consequence of not being able to access it is low, get rid of it. It’s not that important. Don’t file that stuff that you can pick up somewhere else. Get it off your desk. Get it out of your filing cabinets. Throw it away. Delete it off of your email. Keep it away. You don’t need to save it.
In our world it is so easy to retrieve information. If this is a major study and it ties right in with something you’re doing then keep it obviously. But if it doesn’t, get rid of it. Do what you can do, look it over, manage it as effectively as you can, ditch it. Get it off your desk or out of your computer or blackberry. Resolve to handle emails, papers, memos one time then let them go. Respond, or get rid of them, or both.