• Single-Handling vs. Missed Opportunities

    by Alexander Becker on February 14, 2007 | Link

    Single-handling is the high-speed, high-performance productivity concept of dealing with tasks, material or immaterial, on first sight, encounter, or touch. Get it out of the way as soon as it comes up, without ever looking back again.

    Here is a short exercise: Analyze your missed opportunities for a given timeframe, say last year, and determine how much stuff you wanted to get back to. How many interesting things, creative hooks, and potential successes piled up in order to be forgotten and later purged, ironically handled for a second time only to be discarded since their best before dates had long expired.

    The intention of building an archive containing reference material, material dedicated for later, unspecified, potential use, will leave you with constructive insights -- you will find things you long thought lost, only to notice that you manage to live without them, leading to the eventual, logical consequence to finally throw them away.

    Deal with everything immediately, as soon as possible and do not attempt to preserve anything for later. It will be too late. Everything which you do not act upon immediately gets never acted upon at all. Yes, there are exceptions but considering the results of the exercise above -- the list of missed opportunities is long and the ratio of exceptions to misses indicates a negligible count of exceptions -- you have to triage for ultimate productivity.

    If you can decide to deal with it later, whatever it is, you can as well take an additional moment and get it done on the spot. Yes, that's similar to the 2-minute rule from David Allen's Getting Things Done. In fact, it's even easier because it focuses on the yes-or-no decision of acting upon or discarding really fast.

    • If you have to read it anyway, read it now.
    • If you need to make the decision, why not make it now?
    • You first want to prepare ... in order to ... Do it now!

    The advantage of trashing over burying is that, when the time comes to go through the archives, you are not confronted with missed opportunities anymore. Instead, your missed opportunities are, from now on, conscious decisions to not participate.

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