I currently have over 600 notes in my writing inbox.
It's not because I neglect to process them (it's the first thing I do every day). It's because my outcome is not about getting to zero. Just like the number of pages left at the bottom of my kindle books I wish I could simply turn off the constant nagging that I'm trying to get to the end of everything.
Because these numbers give us a false sense of what our purpose is in these pursuits.
Think about it this way. If you have 600 notes in your writing inbox and you have to get to the end of them and 'clear them out' each day what do you do? You process them as fast as you can so you possibly can.
When we're just constantly trying to get to the end of things we rarely enjoy the middle, the moment, the present. We skip through what could be a wonderfully immersive moment because of some imagined end of all things, tick everything off the list bliss.
And it's why we are never satisfied even though we are processing all the notes and reading all the books and getting to the end of our read-it-later lists (jokes, that never happens).
Except for tomorrow, there will be more notes. And there will be more books to read and there will be more information than we can ever get to the end of.
