I bet you all know it. This feeling of having something done. Finished a task. Tied up the loose ends. It’s so gratifying that its almost addictive and I am enjoying it now. In fact, so much that I actually think I have time to write this post. In reality though, I don’t actually know if I have the time or if I should be doing something completely different.

It’s not like I have endless choices at the moment. Currently I am somewhere over Greenland trying to spot polar bears out the window (not much success I might add) on my way to a meeting in the U.S., and as I always do on these flight I clean up my inbox. And I am done!

There are only three emails left in the inbox, all of which are trivial and will be easily taken care of once I get my internet connection back. It will only take me minutes.  Life is good.

Or is it?

I use a GTD-kind of system that is constantly evolving to manage my tasks and what I’ve done now while passing half of the Atlantic, is to read these emails, answer the trivial ones and putting the bigger ones somewhere else with an action attached to them, in either my notebook or OneNote together with all the other actions I have piled up since earlier. So what have I accomplished really?

An empty inbox means that all correspondence is kept moving. I’m not stopping anything from happening, at least nothing I can trivially keep moving. This is a really good thing as being responsive is extremely important. I have accomplished an empty inbox so I should be happy with myself. It’s a good thing to do and I should do it more often. 

Am I done? 

Not even close.. What I have now is an un-prioritized list of actions in a couple of places (I want it like that.. more on that some other time). I don’t really know how big some of these actions are so I have no real clue of how much effort there is left.

But one thing I can do. I can check off my “empty the inbox” checkbox and feel secure that there is no major thing that I am not aware of waiting as an ugly surprise in there and that leaves me with a sense of control that feels really good. Now it’s just a matter of execution to do all the things I have lined up.. so I guess this post is over and I am going to jump into actually doing some more not-so-productive work, namely prioritize and continue my structured procrastination.