I’ve never met a highly effective person who, despite her killer instinct, drive and determination, was nevertheless thwarted by her inability to “hack” her day.

 

Email hacks, sleep hacks, scheduling hacks, marketing hacks, diet hacks… Stop it. Stop being a hack. I bet Warren Buffet has no hacks.

 

Look, I get it. Hacks are alluring and sometimes very helpful, but rarely are they so helpful as to create a watershed moment that changes everything. You change when you take an action that supports the kind of person you want to be, not when you “hack” the process.

 

Here’s my email hack: I call it Inbox 26,000. Cleaning my inbox is not important. By eliminating that task, I eliminate dozens of decisions daily. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about email, on the contrary. I only care about the emails that matter. From time to time– once or twice a week– usually when I am tired and not inclined to work on high impact items, I scroll through the last week of emails to ensure there isn’t something I missed. I usually unsubscribe from a newsletter, too, or create a new rule to keep a batch of emails in a current project organized. And I delete some. Maybe.

 

There is nothing I should do about my email, except that which is necessary to support my goals. The same goes for every decision, every day. What you choose to do will always be more important than how you choose to do it.