Fighting the urge of empty progress

I was talking to this guy and this guy at this place recently, and the conversation moved into talking about the impulse to work your email inbox in an effort to feel like you accomplished something, when in reality often times you’re just move tasks around and not really accomplishing anything.

Man am I guilty of this.

It feels so good to work the email inbox and get it down to inbox zero. The question is, is that really the best use of time?

I love my process – emails  and to-do’s go into Evernote, where I organize them by #tags and attack them accordingly. It allows me to prioritize the most important things for me to get done on any given day. But I also think that I hide behind my process, allowing the doing of the process to fulfill me vs. the actual doing of the work.

Anyone else feel this same thing?  What have you done to make sure you don’t get stuck in the cycle of working hard, but not actually doing anything?