Oh you can file it…but first read it….and if you’re not going to read it then just delete it.

Radical? Maybe. But how many more “important” items do you want to save to read later?

The only way I know to avoid clutter is to stop making it - now.

Clutter isn’t always papers spread everywhere. It doesn’t always look like piles of things left on counters “to do” later. Clutter can also be what we keep in our head as “unfinished things to do.”

How many of you get ezines (like this one) that you want to read but you immediately put it into a folder on your computer to read “later.”

I know it happens. I hear often two things.

1. Out of the blue one of you will call or email me to tell me, “What a great ezine issue. You must have been looking over my shoulder.”

I love that. But I’m always amazed that it can often be an ezine that I wrote weeks ago and it is just now being read.

2. I can be in conversation with one of you and we’re talking about follow-up or sponsoring or getting your downline into action and I’ll ask if you found a particular ezine issue helpful with that. The response, “Oh I haven’t read it yet, I have it your folder though.

Here is a trick to “keeping up” that my Online Business Manager Tina Forsyth shared with me. You don’t need to pour over every word – just speed read the document.

Simple solution right. (Most solutions are by the way.)

Many of us think we need to pour over every word and get every little nuance. We don’t. What we need to do is speed read everything we believe is of value to us.

Speed read means just that. Force yourself to read the document quickly.

When you come to something that jumps out at you, an idea or tool that you can use, take a moment right then to decide how you will use that idea in your business starting right now.

Then use it at least once that day.

For example, let’s take this article. The number one idea here is speed read.

If you think this is a tool or an idea that will help you to take in valuable information as it comes, and avoid clutter and the guilt of all that is left unread. Then promise yourself that you will speed read at least one item that comes your way today that you would normally put into a folder to read later.

Ladies and gentlemen change is a process. It does take a while. But it starts now. Not later.

I can hear the chorus, “But I can’t. I don’t always have time to read my email not even speed read it.”

Here is the solution, don’t push the send/receive button.

If you don’t have time to read and answer your email then you’re not supposed to be sitting in front of it.

You’re supposed to be doing something else. Or, obviously you’d have time to read and appropriately deal with your email right then.

Typically the “I’ll read it later” turns out to be a calendar issue. How have you planned your day? Did you plan it? Or are you just chasing it? I hope this quick note was helpful and you were able to speed read right through it, right now. :)

© 2006 Jillian Middleton All rights reserved.