What can we remove?

I am a strong proponent of emptying the e-mail in-box every day. The e-mail in-box was designed to play the role of receiving e-mail, not the role of a bulk filing system, and not the role of a task management system.

These examples of effective production processes share the following properties: It’s easy to review who is working on what and how it’s going. Work can unfold without significant amounts of unscheduled communication. There’s a known procedure for updating work assignments as the process progresses.

process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate. To better explain this process and why it works consider the following process-centric responses to the sample e-mails from earlier: Process-Centric