This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done.
The book, I mean. The one by David Allen, the patron saint of productivity. If you are any level of life hacking nerd, you’ve heard of this guy, and even if you haven’t, guaranteed you’ve tried some methods he pioneered.
Depending on my circumstances, some of those methods are absolute game-changers, while others seem less necessary.
But one of them that I’ve been using since I first read Allen’s book over a decade ago, is some variation of the Someday/Maybe file.
The idea is that you’ll never have the time and resources to do all the things you’d like to do. Of course you won’t. (Oliver Burkeman is the expert on this, so if you want to go deep on that idea, he’s your guy.)
The way David Allen’s Getting Things Done system handles things that you’d like to do but can’t or don’t need to do right now, or even in the near future, is to put them in a file called Someday/Maybe.
And then he recommends scheduling a little time once a month, maybe once a quarter, to review all the things in your Someday/Maybe file and see if any of them pop out at you to say, “It’s time.”
It’s a great idea. But I only do half of it.
My Someday/Maybe file lives in a couple of places: I have a section on my to-do list marked, dutifully, as “Someday/Maybe” that I almost never review, and I have a label in my Gmail called “Read/watch/listen later” that I’m pretty sure I haven’t looked at once in like eight years.
Together, these are my Infinity Drawer. Anytime there’s something that I’d like to do, or read, or watch, or listen to, or whatever, but I can’t do it right now, and it’s not important enough to schedule time to do in the near future, I throw it into the Drawer.
At the conscious level, I know that there is functionally no difference between the drawer and the dustbin, but the drawer gives me a vague and comforting sense that I’ll get to it. Maybe. Someday.
Which is just the dab of subconscious salve I need to let it go and move on to something that actually deserves my decidedly finite allotment of attention.
Click at least one of these or else…
…the next time a dog licks you, it’ll be on the lips, right after it licks itself YOU KNOW WHERE.
Throw it into the Infinity Drawer