Archive or act: The ninety-day clear out rule

Hey 🙂

Since the start of the year, I’ve added a new ritual to the way I manage tasks, projects, and work in general. For me it’a ninety-day rule — though honestly, you could probably be a lot more harsh with this if you wanted to. Sixty days would work. Forty-five if you really want to dial it in.

This is really about knowing that if something’s important, it will come back to you in some way, shape, or form. You don’t need to hold onto everything just in case. But you don’t want all that clutter lying around either — it’s healthy to just clear it all out and make sure you’re not carrying around a pile of digital clutter in your working life.

So the rule, for me, looks like this: if a task has been sitting in Google Tasks for over twelve weeks, it gets archived. If there are emails sitting unread or not dealt with, they get archived.

The card system we use for managing projects is Fizzy, which I love. (First 1,000 cards are free, if you want to check it out.) You can set a timer so that any card that hasn’t had any interaction for a set period — our’s is set to ninety days — just gets moved into a “not for now” pile automatically. What’s great about it is that it’s constantly clearing itself out. It’s not sitting front and centre nagging at me, but if I ever want to go dig something back up, I can.

These are just a few simple examples.

If you want to try this for yourself, here’s the approach:

Pick your timeframe. Somewhere between forty-five and ninety days — six to twelve weeks — is about right. Set the rule for yourself first, before you look at anything.
Go through every place ideas and tasks pile up. Your project management tool, your task list, your inbox, Slack, Post-it notes, sticky notes — anywhere you collect things.
For anything older than your timeframe, make a choice. You’ve really only got three options:
- Archive it (or delete it) — get it out of sight.
- Deal with it — if it’s still genuinely important, do it now.
- Delegate it — hand it to someone else if it needs to happen but doesn’t need to be you.
Don’t overthink the delete. If it’s important, it’ll find its way back to you.

This applies to anything: unread messages, emails that have sat untouched for ninety days or more, ideas you’ve been sitting on for ages. Just get them archived and do the clear-out. There’s something nice about doing this at the turn of a month too — it’s the end of July as I write this, and there’s a bit of a “summer clearing” feeling to it.

Your turn

So instead of a reflective journal entry this week, your task is this: take this exercise and actually do it. Set your own timeframe, go through your tasks, your inbox, wherever things pile up for you, and make the call on each one — archive, deal with it, or delegate it.

Write back and let me know how you got on. What timeframe did you set yourself? Was there any resistance to deleting or archiving things in your productivity space? I’d love to hear about it.

I hope you feel a bit more liberated having a deadline for letting go of the stuff that, for whatever reason, isn’t important right now.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.