How long should it take to process a single item?

[JackLondon]

The canonical recommended time to process a single item is around 30 seconds. Most of my inputs come in the form of long and complicated emails and documents, each containing multiple actions.

For example, I receive an email regarding a treatment programme for a patient. This email must first be forwarded to other stakeholders that should have been cc'ed but weren't (two-minute action). I then need to record that I received this correspondence in a log file for the patient (two-minute action). The email contains a date for an upcoming meeting that needs to go into my calendar (two-minute action) and another promise of a meeting which needs to be tracked on my "waiting for" list, so I add that. The treatment plan suggested in the email must be discussed with another clinician and an outside agency. So, I add a note to my "agenda" for that particular clinician with a link back to the email and add a "next action' to my "calls" list to arrange an appointment with the agency. The email may contain several other similar next actions, all of which must be tracked or put on a list. Finally, I'll archive the email in an appropriate folder. Now I consider the email processed. But, all that has taken me 25 minutes, way longer than the recommended 30 seconds.

The only way I could "process" an email like the above example in 30 seconds would be to add a next action saying process email x and put the email in my "action" folder, but then I'd end up with a list which is almost identical to how my email inbox looked, which doesn't add any value, doesn't move anything forward or relieve any stress as I still essentially have a mountain of unprocessed email.

My question is, am I missing something fundamental about what processing is? I can't imagine I'm alone in receiving complicated, multi-faceted inputs; many people must be in similar situations, needing much longer than 30 seconds to process a single input. How does everyone else process these things?

 

[John Forrister]

It varies widely for me. A couple of seconds to delete an email that is obviously spam from the subject. A couple of minutes for a long-ish email that forks in different directions.

If there's a canonical suggestion of 30 seconds, that is an average that includes a lot of emails that can be processed in way under 30 seconds. From years back I heard an average of 2–3 minutes to clarify each item.

You're doing fine. As you said, you receive inputs that need a lot of thought to clarify, and may have multiple actions. That you are processing your inputs is the important thing. Good for you.

 

[Jeremy Jones]

I know how you feel, @JackLondon.

I've settled on a two-minute rule for cleaning out my Inbox. If I can't address something completely in two minutes, I will add it to my @Action Sppt folder. I then have a time block in my calendar as often as necessary to keep that folder empty.

When I'm executing well, this folder never contains more than two dozen emails.

If the email is something I need to delegate, I'll forward it with the request, then add it to my @Wtng For Sppt folder. Again, I have a block to clean out this folder. It usually contains fewer items, perhaps one dozen.

These time blocks give me the 10 to 30 minutes necessary to address those bigger emails, even if all of that time is just reading the email in detail and really deciding what to do.

This process has the benefit of keeping me very near Inbox Zero. This has the benefit of making my Weekly Review much less daunting, and more effective.

 

[Oogiem]

am I missing something fundamental about what processing is? I can't imagine I'm alone in receiving complicated, multi-faceted inputs; many people must be in similar situations, needing much longer than 30 seconds to process a single input. How does everyone else process these things?

Basically like you do. Some things take a few seconds, obvious trash or info I might need but can be just filed. Others can take half an hour or longer to get fully processed.

I must admit that in some cases when I know I've got an email or similar input that it going to take a long time to parse out and properly process I leave it in my inboxes until I have the time to tackle the long time to process items. It's not ideal but it works and I don't create double work for myself.

I think you are doing it just fine.

 

[schmeggahead]

then I'd end up with a list which is almost identical to how my email inbox looked

This made me pause for a minute. There may be a tacit assumption that every email will take 25 minutes to process and they are all of equal importance. I would consider at the start of the processing of email to do a less than 5 second examination of each email to confirm this assumption. If you find something that can be dispatched in 2 minutes, I would do it on this scan. It also might help relieve the pressure of having a large inbox of unprocessed items by confirming they really are fine being processed sequentially and taking 25 minutes per email.

Clayton.
We don't know what we don't know and when we don't know we don't know, that is a potential mess waiting to happen.

 

[gtdstudente]

The canonical recommended time to process a single item is around 30 seconds. Most of my inputs come in the form of long and complicated emails and documents, each containing multiple actions.

For example, I receive an email regarding a treatment programme for a patient. This email must first be forwarded to other stakeholders that should have been cc'ed but weren't (two-minute action). I then need to record that I received this correspondence in a log file for the patient (two-minute action). The email contains a date for an upcoming meeting that needs to go into my calendar (two-minute action) and another promise of a meeting which needs to be tracked on my "waiting for" list, so I add that. The treatment plan suggested in the email must be discussed with another clinician and an outside agency. So, I add a note to my "agenda" for that particular clinician with a link back to the email and add a "next action' to my "calls" list to arrange an appointment with the agency. The email may contain several other similar next actions, all of which must be tracked or put on a list. Finally, I'll archive the email in an appropriate folder. Now I consider the email processed. But, all that has taken me 25 minutes, way longer than the recommended 30 seconds.

The only way I could "process" an email like the above example in 30 seconds would be to add a next action saying process email x and put the email in my "action" folder, but then I'd end up with a list which is almost identical to how my email inbox looked, which doesn't add any value, doesn't move anything forward or relieve any stress as I still essentially have a mountain of unprocessed email.

My question is, am I missing something fundamental about what processing is? I can't imagine I'm alone in receiving complicated, multi-faceted inputs; many people must be in similar situations, needing much longer than 30 seconds to process a single input. How does everyone else process these things?

JackLondon,

With a 'focused fixation' for Easier and Easier . . . as little time as possible with an humbly appropriate "Double-Check"

 

[Gardener]

My question is, am I missing something fundamental about what processing is? I can't imagine I'm alone in receiving complicated, multi-faceted inputs; many people must be in similar situations, needing much longer than 30 seconds to process a single input. How does everyone else process these things?

When I'm processing, my goal is to get the thing out of my inbox and down a funnel to the next step.

So how would I process that email...

If all of these things happen often, I'd probably already have a structure set up to batch them. A "Forward stuff" folder and a "Log stuff" folder and a "Maybe meeting" folder and a "Maybe agenda" folder, and so on and so on. If there are any filterable characteristics, I'd auto-filter duplicates of the emails into likely folders, but odds are that I would frequently be duplicate-dragging. So that email would be out of my inbox and in the folders in thirty seconds or less, and I would have some mild reassurance that I know what it is and approximately how urgent it is. I would do that through my whole mailbox, to get that mild reassurance for all the emails.

Then I'd periodically go into the folders and finish processing them in batch mode, deleting each item as I do the one small thing for the folder, because that's the only reason it's in the folder.

I'd go through "Maybe meeting" with my calendar open, "Log stuff" with my log open, and so on. Those would probably be relatively mindless, and I would have batched that mindless work. I would also have a "Read This" folder for items that require actual thought, batching the work that requires a brain. I like my work divided by mood and brain power.

This is roughly what I do with my work emails, but it's much simpler. Start with 100 emails. Eighty have already been auto-filtered out of sight before I get there, never to be read. Perhaps one out of the remaining twenty requires an actual quick answer. Three more out of that twenty go into my "Read This" folder. (It would more accurately be called "Deal With This", but I'm used to the name by now.) The remaining sixteen or so go straight into the unsorted archive for the year.

Then my inbox is empty, and I'm much more likely to catch the next one-out-of-a-hundred that wants immediate attention.

I periodically go into "Read This" and do a second layer of processing, converting some emails into tasks, dragging others into the "Really Just Read" subfolder, and demoting others to go into the unsorted archive after all.

Edited to add: I'm not saying that this pre-processing step makes anything more efficient--it's probably less efficient. But it shortens the "Oh My God What's In Here?!" interval, and that's important to me.

 

[Matt_M]

From a pseudo-objective standpoint, I noticed the phrase "two-minute action" several times in the description of processing this kind of email and the total spent processing this kind of email being somewhere around 25 minutes. Part of me questions a couple of things:

1. How many of these two-minute actions really are two minutes? I know there are topics on the forum that go over this and I've got mixed thoughts on the two-minute rule/guideline. Sometimes, it might be beneficial to ignore certain two-minute actions especially if there are a lot of them that could instead be batch handled in bulk.
2. Is there "work" being done during the processing of the items? It sounds like there might be some work being done or, as alluded to in the previous point, work being disguised as a series of two-minute actions. Be careful about over applying two-minute actions or over clarifying things.
3. Are you the right person to be doing a lot of these tasks? Can any of them be delegated to someone else? You mentioned that certain folks are not included in on these emails quite often ... have we tried solving this root problem? Essentially, can we apply the principles of continuous improvement and root cause analysis to prevent some of this work and a pseudo kind of "firefighting" when handling items?
4. Assuming all else equal and this is indeed the correct way to process these items, then I am wondering perhaps is your system causing some friction or unnecessary overhead to interact with it as you are processing items? Could there be slight tweaks or improvements in the system to streamline things so that they don't require as much effort/time to classify and organize in your system?

Just food for thought. I don't know what kind of tools you have available, security requirements (HIPPA and all that), team members, etc. Certainly a tip I picked up when I need to do a lot of scheduling of meetings or so forth is to actually batch that work into its own "Scheduling & Planning" context whereby (usually at the beginning and the end of the day) I look at my calendars and other folks' calendars to find meeting times, see what's coming up, whose out of the office, and so forth. Usually, it just helps to do that all at once, when I have a period of time to focus on making sure I don't shoot myself in the proverbial foot with over scheduling a day with meetings or what not (some days I am better at this than others).

Just my observations, it's a great question nonetheless and very thought provoking.

For my own personal answer, I usually take around 1 minute (give or take) to process items. I don't do the work when I am processing items and chunk/batch a lot of the common items together because there's often overlap and, as I mentioned before, in the past decade or so I am more cautious about the two-minute rule. I try to avoid spending a lot of time on two-minute items or fooling myself into thinking "Oh, yeah, that'll be really quick. It'll just take a minute" only to end up going down a rabbit hole due to uncontrollable external factors.

That's my two cents on it at least.

 

[mcogilvie]

I must confess I am somewhat unsure of how to respond to the question “How long should it take to process a single item?” There have been a lot of thoughtful and detailed answers. However, I zoom in on the words “should”, “process”, and “single item”. “Should” is a word that often gets people into trouble, because it implies some standard that may not exist or be relevant, necessary or desirable. “Single item” is also problematic, because a single email, phone call, or other input can generate many next actions, calendar items, or a set of projects. Sometimes a single Item reverberates at the highest levels of our lives, and gives rise to many more things. Finally, there’s the word ”process.” This implies a kind of simple, almost mechanical procedure that handles everything. GTD does offer a system which can handle it all, but it is not necessarily mechanical. Recall David Allen’s parable of the water and the rock: the water responds appropriately to every input. However, the ripples from big rocks take longer to die out.

 

[Gardener]

How many of these two-minute actions really are two minutes?

IMO, a flock of two-minute actions stemming from one input, as in the starting example in the thread, are not really two minute actions. Of course, I also don't use the two minute rule at all, so my view of a two minute action is not all that relevant.

 

[René Lie]

Just a quick thought:

In the latest version of the GTD nomenclature, "process" is replaced by "clarify". You need to clarify what something means to you, and organize it into the right "bucket".

To me, clarify seems like something that takes less time than processing. The point is not to be working out of your inbox. Sure, you will get a lot of stuff done, but you will need to see all of those items alongside with what you've previously clarified in order to trust that you are making the optimal decision in the moment... This is also why the order of you moment to moment review is calendar first, next actions lists second, and inbox third.