Rands explains why most productivity systems fail: the maintenance overhead outweighs their value, and offers a minimal, habit-based approach to email and task triage that lets leaders focus on real work.
Productivity tools are only worth using when the effort to keep them running is less than the value they deliver. Rands calls this the Tool Rule: if maintenance exceeds benefit, discard the tool. He shows how most systems balloon from ten tasks to fifty with tags, buckets and deadlines, turning upkeep into the actual work.
He illustrates the rule with his own email habits-unsubscribing instantly, deleting irrelevant messages, and acting on the few that matter-creating an inbox that stays at zero. He also tried a paper-based list that forced daily rewrites, and an automatic delete-old-todos feature, both of which collapsed once the maintenance cost grew.
The takeaway for leaders is to adopt habits that make the tool invisible: understand each task enough to decide now, commit to work today or move it to a clear future bucket, and avoid the lure of endless "later" queues. When the system no longer requires attention, it has earned its place.
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