Reply by Friday

Correspondence that arrives at the head office gets one of two treatments the same day: it is answered, or it is written on the pending sheet with the date it will be answered by. What it never does is sit in a pile with no date at all.

A wire desk tray holding a few envelopes, one with a small paper slip tucked under its string, on a tidy desk — The out tray on a Thursday afternoon. Every item in it already knows when it will leave.

Why the desk does it

Unfinished matters have a way of tugging at attention. A letter you mean to answer, a form half filled in, a promise to look into something: each one returns to mind at odd moments, usually while you are trying to concentrate on something else. Psychologists have studied this for nearly a century, and one encouraging finding from more recent work is that simply writing down a concrete plan for an unfinished task seems to quiet much of that tugging, even before the task is done.

The desk's pending sheet is exactly that kind of plan. The item is out of the head and on paper, with a date beside it.

Carrying it home

Everyone has a private pile: the dentist who needs a call, the warranty card, the drawer that sticks, the friend who wrote last month. A single sheet with each item and a "by" date beside it does the same job at home as at the office. The very small items, the ones that would take a couple of minutes, are best done on the spot rather than listed.

Friday is a good day to look over the sheet, cross off what is closed and give a new date to what is not. A loose end with a date is a plan; a loose end without one is just a worry.

On your own desk

Keep one pending sheet, not notes scattered across the house.
Write each open matter on it with a "by" date, and handle anything under two minutes straight away.
Each Friday, strike through the closed items and re-date the open ones.

Next circular: sealed before dark