How to Achieve Inbox Zero

Introduction

In last week’s post I made the case for Inbox Zero: that is, for being so on top of your email that your inbox is virtually empty (say, a dozen or fewer emails). To recap, Inbox Zero is about being more effective with email, meaning you’ll possibly read less of it, definitely re-read much less of it, and stop missing important emails because they were buried under all the unimportant ones. The goal is to make better use of our time, so that we spend less of it doing email. In this post, I am going to explain exactly how to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero, based on how I’ve managed it for the last several years.

[A note on the art above: a concerned reader was aghast at my use of A.I. to create the art for last week’s post. She was so keen to keep it real, she created this original art just for me—and you.]

One prerequisite

There is an important prerequisite to achieving Inbox Zero, at least the way I do it: you have to use Gmail as your email interface. This doesn’t mean you have to use a Gmail account. (More on this later.) Now, I’m not some major Google fanboy, and they didn’t sponsor or promote this post (or this blog) in any way. Google makes its money through ads, and I’m not big on advertising. I also don’t appreciate how their YouTube algorithm tried to addict me to sexy yoga videos. Moreover, I bristled at the original Gmail because the consumer version, when it came out, had ads that were generated based on its bot reading the email message content. This so unnerved me, I created a technique to stymie it. But Google eventually ditched the ads, probably after reading this blog and realizing I was right. (Yes, that was a joke.) But now I’m sold on Gmail.

When my employer switched to Google Workspace, and Gmail became a part of my daily life, I realized not only that its conversation view is much more efficient, but that the use of labels instead of folders makes all kinds of sense. In fact, labels are the key to maintaining Inbox Zero. So if you’re still committed to using Outlook, this post isn’t going to be of much help.

If you don’t use Gmail, don’t stop reading! If you’re not among the 76% of Americans who use Gmail for their personal email, you can still keep your Yahoo or Hotmail account, and set up the Gmail interface (both on your laptop and your Android app) to pull in email from either (or both) of those platforms. The Gmail interface works great for my personal email (which is on my own domain, via the Yahoo/Turbify platform), along with my Gmail, of course. It’s nice to get everything in one place.

(I’m not going to explain how to port your Yahoo or Hotmail over to Gmail … that kind of task is what ChatGPT is for. It did a great job guiding me through the process. When one of its instructions doesn’t work—which will happen, as these interfaces undergo minor changes all the time—ChatGPT can course-correct very well. In fact, if you told ChatGPT, “I am having trouble with the POP3 settings because my neighbor is having a huge party and they’re making too much noise,” GPT will help by asking, “Would you like me to draft a speech or brief note that you can present to ask them to quiet down?” And if upon reading this draft you respond, “The note needs to be shorter and more emphatic because I want to write it in Sharpie on my husband’s bare chest,” GPT will accommodate that request as well. So, you may now wonder, why wouldn’t you just ask ChatGPT how to get to Inbox Zero? The answer is, because it’s only really good at rote technical configurations, not at strategy. Yet.)

My Inbox Zero strategy

As with all techniques for everything, there are five steps to reaching and maintaining Inbox Zero. No, this methodology won’t get you to where you literally have zero emails in your inbox, but when you start doing start-of-day triage and some catch-up throughout the day, you’ll get to where most of the time you’ll have relatively few. The crucial thing is to have no more  in your inbox than Gmail’s first page can display. The default is 50 threads. Anything that doesn’t fit on this first page is guaranteed to be neglected, because the chances of you ever seeing it are negligible. (Sure, you could find those emails with the search feature, but how will you know to search if you don’t know the email exists? Do you routinely search on “invoice past due”? Or are you waiting for someone to say, “What? You didn’t see my email?” so you can search on their address?)

With no further ado, here are the steps.

Step #1 – Create a few filters and a couple of new labels

This step is mainly necessary for your work email, and is optional if you work for a small business. But if you work for a large corporation, you surely get a ton of email that’s broadcast daily from HR, your marketing department, news feeds, vendors, and various other non-personal sources. You are generally not expected to respond to these emails, so they should definitely be considered lower priority. They shouldn’t compete for precious visible-inbox real estate with any email that a human took some trouble writing.

Thus, you should create filters that target the daily all-hands update emails and filter them out such that they don’t even hit your inbox. Since these messages are not as useless as direct marketing solicitations, you’ll want to also label them (automatically!) in case you need to find them later. Figure out how many labels you need: you might have a “Corp updates” label and another for “Industry news,” or you might just have a catch-all for “Bulletins etc.” Now, I know filtering out emails so they never hit your inbox can seem scary, but bear in mind two things. One, if you haven’t been doing Inbox Zero, lot of emails have always been invisible to you anyway, by being buried among others and/or not on the first page of your inbox. Two, you can always peek at the mass of unfiltered emails by clicking the “All Mail” link down the left of your screen:

(If you don’t see this “All Mail” link it’s because Gmail has hidden it; click the “More” link to expose it. In the snapshot at left, the view is expanded so there’s a “Less” link; that’s where the “More” link would be shown if this view were collapsed.)

For your personal email, the first filter should get rid of unasked-for solicitations like the daily email you get from Speedo because you once bought that bathing suit from them (you know, the one that didn’t even fit so you returned it). Filter out all these quasi-spammers—the companies you did choose to do business with who are now like remoras. (Myself, I have a Hotmail account that I use for all e-commerce so I can more easily ignore that spam. If I need to file a receipt I log into the Hotmail, find it, and forward it to my personal email. Otherwise I ignore Hotmail entirely; it’s at Inbox 48,376.)

With these various filters in place, at least you’ve somewhat mitigated the fusillade of daily emails, hopefully reducing it to under fifty so that facing your Inbox for daily triage will be less daunting.

Next, if this is your work email, create a label that is your boss’s name, and set up a filter that applies this label to each of this person’s emails to you—without removing the email from your Inbox. Make this a bold, perhaps red label. If you’re lucky and your boss is named Aaron, this label will automatically show up at the top of your list of labels (which is also your list of folders … more on this later). If your boss’s name isn’t Aaron, put an underscore character at the beginning to move it up. Going forward, instead of starting your workday by perusing your inbox, you can start in your “Boss” folder (or, if your emails don’t pile up too fast, you can still start in the inbox and just look for that bright red label.) The idea here is that the very first emails you should read are the ones from the person who has direct influence on your salary. In the below example, the person’s boss is named Zoe, so two underscore characters are required.

You’ll also want to create a label called “_Follow-up.” Make this a bright color, too. The underscore character before the “F” is to move this label to(ward) the top of the list. The “_Follow-up” label is important for both your work and personal email … more on this later.

Does it make sense to automatically flag emails from your spouse, the way you did with your boss? Perhaps, but only if you get a lot of email from him or her. (Mine just yells across the house, like me.)

Again, ChatGPT can walk you through how to set up the actual filters and create and color-code the labels. All kinds of helpful people have already documented this process in various forums etc., so ChatGPT can research and distill that process for you.

Step #2: Clean slate

Obviously if you’re currently buried in thousands of emails after years of neglect, you’ll need to start with something other than mere triage … it’s a little late for that. To achieve a clean slate, take a deep breath and ask yourself what the odds are that you’re really going to ever read emails 51 through 25,359 in your inbox. Once you have accepted that the answer is “hell no,” you need to just archive them all, in one fell swoop. First navigate to your inbox. Then find the little checkbox just below the “Search mail” field at the top of the Gmail interface. If you hover your cursor over it, a tool-tip will appear that says “Select.” Check that box to select the first 50 emails, or better yet, accept the offer to select all 25,359 of them (i.e., however many you have total). Then click the icon next to the checkbox that looks like a folder with a down-arrow on it, as shown below. This will archive all selected messages, which means they’ll no longer be in your inbox. Where do they go? Into the ether. Probably the same place electricity goes when you turn out the light. They’re still on the mail server, though, and you can still see them by selecting “All Mail” as described above. But you don’t need to see them. They’re dead to you. Get on with your life.

[A note on the screenshots in this post: some are a bit hard to read. Click on a picture to enlarge it.]

The only problem with that mass archival is that nothing is labeled, so it’ll be hard to find past emails. That’s the consequence of waiting this long to get organized. Proper implementation of Inbox Zero means being organized going forward, not just clutter-free. Thus, once you have zero emails in your inbox (or maybe half a dozen new emails since they continuously pop up out of nowhere), you need to do regular triage on all the new stuff.

Step #3: Triage and pre-labeling

Okay, let’s assume you now have a clean slate and an inbox that doesn’t represent years of neglect. When you open Gmail first thing in the morning, you’ll likely still see dozens of emails, and you’ll start to panic, but don’t. Just follow these rules in making your way through the pile.

Start with the boss. Remember that new filter you created that automatically labels emails from your boss? Read those first. (If this is your personal email, and you created a rule to automatically flag messages from, say, your kid who’s a terrified college freshman, start with those.)

Jettison spam. If you see spam or quasi-spam messages, delete them on sight. You can go down the list of threads selecting all the chaff via the checkbox, then click the garbage can icon on your toolbar. This is incredibly satisfying. If you’re seeing a lot of spam from a single source, create a filter to kill it off forever. (Zap Zappos! See ya later, Speedo!)

(I had to cheat with the snapshot above … that’s a view of the Promotions tab, where Gmail automatically moves the quasi-spam solicitations. If you don’t see inbox tabs like Promotions, Social, and Updates, enable them in Settings/Categories.)

Scan for important messages first. Scan through the subject lines for anything that looks important, like one from a friend you’re making plans with, or a work colleague you’re knee-deep in a project with, or a thread you’ve been working that has new activity, and open that first. Scanning never worked before, because you had too many emails. Now it’s actually a reasonable way to triage.

Pre-label your threads. For every email you open, all you’re doing right now is skimming it to judge its level of importance, and—crucially—labeling it. This is the most important rule: don’t wait until later to “file” it. Label it now, and it’ll kind of almost be filed already. (More on the “why” of this in a minute.) Note that you’re not moving this using the very obvious button on the tool bar (i.e., the one shown below). That will remove the thread from your inbox. You want to label it while leaving it in the inbox, for this triage phase.

Instead of clicking “Move,” click on the three-dot “kabob” icon (if you hover over it, a tooltip will tell you it’s the “More” icon) and select “Label as” from the drop-down menu. It’ll show you a list of all your labels, and you can either just scroll down and find the right label, or you can start typing the name of a label and it’ll zip right to it. Click on the label name, if you’re only applying one label, and you’re done.

You won’t need to bother with the kebab menu if you switch to the advanced toolbar. Here’s how to switch:

Then you’ll have a dedicated button to apply a label without moving the thread:

The great thing about labels in Gmail, vs. folders in platforms like Outlook, is that you can apply more than one label to an email thread. That way, it’ll show up in multiple folders. Well, not folders exactly … that’s the confusing thing about labels in Gmail. Yes, they label message threads, but they also act like folders. (Kind of like how light is both a particle and a wave.) When it comes to classifying a thread, you’re applying labels. But labels act like folders when you’re at the main Gmail screen and want to navigate your threads. It’s like your threads can be in two or more folders at once.

Let me give you an example. Several of my friends and family members like beer as much as I do. We send each other Beck’sts, which are beer-themed emails (click here for details). Often one Beck’st begets another, and we have stirring dialogues not just about our beers, but about other topics like being middle-aged, being a parent, etc. (Oddly, a fair bit of my modern correspondence begins with a Beck’st.) Since these threads aren’t just about beer, but also about friends and family, I want to label them accordingly. So I select “Label as” from the drop-down, and check boxes next to all the appropriate labels:

When I’m done, the thread will have all the labels it needs. This means I can hunt for it in my brother B—’s folder, or my friend D—’s folder, etc. If I remember, for example, that D— wrote me about becoming a grandpa, I can search on “grandpa” in his folder whether or not I remember (years from now) that he announced this via a Beck’st.

(Sometimes, you’ll have labeled and archived—i.e., filed—a thread only to receive a new response to it, perhaps from someone on the distro who hadn’t chimed in before. The thread will show up in the Inbox again, at which point you can add the new correspondent’s label to it.)

Remember, you don’t maintain Inbox Zero by taking action on every email right away—you’re just labeling it during triage when this is so easy to do. Triage consists of figuring out whom the email is from, and what it’s about (if you bother to file/label emails by topic). You’re labeling it now, so you never have to revisit it again. Then you can actually get some work done, knowing the most important emails have at least been read and you know what’s waiting for action. Disorganization is distracting!

Again, the pre-labeling is the game-changer … if you try to file emails later, you’ll waste gobs of time re-reading each thread to try to remember what it’s about. Label it the first time you see it, as this will only take seconds. Then, filing later is just a matter of jettisoning it from your inbox.

Flag for follow-up.  If an email will obviously require a reply or some other action, don’t just label it by sender and/or topic—also apply the “_Follow-up” label you created in step #1. Some email is just information, and some needs action. This is the best way to differentiate. Also, by selecting the “_Follow-up” label/folder, you’re basically creating a to-do list of emails requiring action. 

To add to my exhortation to pre-label, the key difference between an email folder (like Outlook uses) and the labels that Gmail uses is that a label doesn’t, by itself, move the email. It just gives it an identity that will persist forever (unless you decide to un-label it). A labeled email is breathtakingly close to being a filed email … all you have to do is get it out of the inbox (by archiving it, or removing the “Inbox” label, which amount to the same thing).

Step #4: Archive messages

Once you’ve read or at least scanned all the emails in your inbox, it’s time to tackle the ones you labeled “_Follow-up.” Since this (probably) won’t be that many threads, you can see them all at once (perhaps by clicking the “_Follow-up” folder, or just eyeballing them in the non-overrun inbox), and decide which are the highest priority. Once they’re dealt with, you can remove the “_Follow-up” label and archive them. If there are emails remaining in your inbox, perhaps a few of them should stay there (to be visible for a while, even if they don’t require action) but others can be archived right away, and all of them eventually. (There’s really no point leaving them in your inbox forever, especially when they’re already labeled.)

There are two ways to archive (i.e., file) email threads: the Archive button, and removing the “Inbox” label. Here’s how you’d archive via the button:

Or, you can click the little “x” on the “Inbox” label; now this message will no longer appear in the inbox.

This second method has the benefit of being applicable across labels. For example, it’s how you’d remove the “_Follow-up” label after action is taken. So when you think your inbox is getting out of hand, you can start at the bottom and work your way up, deciding when it’s time to click the “x” next to the “Inbox” and/or “_Follow-up” labels as appropriate. When you’re done, not only will you be closer to Inbox Zero, but you’ll have made great progress in your filing. If you get behind on that, but realize 20 of your emails are no longer timely, you can just check them all and click Archive. Since they already had labels, they’re now correctly filed, and you didn’t have to reopen them!

A final note on labels: I recommend that, upon sending an email that is not a response (i.e., starting a new thread), you go into your Sent items and slap a label on the message. For example, when I send a Beck’st, I’ll label it, so that even if nobody responds it’ll still show up in my Beck’st folder. And if somebody does respond, his response will already be labeled.

Step #5: Segregate email accounts (optional)

It’s not uncommon to juggle multiple email accounts. Over the past few years, I’ve had my personal email in Outlook; my high school mountain bike coaching emails on a different address, also in Outlook; and my Gmail, which is non-work business email (e.g., LinkedIn stuff). Now I’ve collapsed all three into my Gmail interface, to take advantage of all the features described above.

That said, I still like to have my personal email separate from business, so I created a rule that adds an “Inbox – albertnet account” label on all emails addressed to my personal address, and has these messages skip the main (Gmail) inbox. As with my other inbox, messages are automatically labeled as they come in, and then when I’ve responded (or have decided I don’t need to) I archive them by removing the “Inbox – albertnet account” label.

If your Gmail interface manages multiple addresses, you can set any of your addresses as default, so when you create a message it’ll come from that address, unless you manually change it for that thread. When you reply to a message, it will be sent from whatever account received the email, unless you manually change it for that thread.

Conclusion

I’ll grant you this has been a long, complicated post. It might be pretty daunting to imagine embracing this approach. But to recall last week’s post, an Adobe study of 1,000 white collar Americans found that on average they spent 8.9 hours a day between personal and work email … wouldn’t it be nice to streamline this? Wouldn’t you rather learn one methodology that makes you more efficient, than waste valuable time on into the future on this unavoidable activity? I’m here to tell you that I’m far more efficient and effective since I adopted Inbox Zero … you can be, too.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

My Favorite Failure

Introduction

A year or two ago I came across an article in an airline magazine or some such (probably a regular column) titled “My Favorite Failure” or “My Favorite Mistake.” I can’t find it now (Googling “Favorite Mistake” turns up a hundred variations on some Sheryl Crow song). The article concerned some famous pianist playing his first competition and having such a battle of nerves that he botched the opening notes and actually started over, which ruined his chances of scoring well. The judges, however, were impressed that he started over (something to do with the sanctity of the piece or something) and said so. He learned some valuable lesson and now he’s famous, so it’s a heartwarming story, etc.

Do I have a favorite mistake? For me, the chief problem with this exercise is choosing one among the many, but I’ve settled on a favorite (for now). If I were famous, you’d be reading this in some magazine.

My favorite failure

I’ve had some great failures, like when I tried to ride through a giant mud puddle during the warmup lap of a mountain bike race and ended up entirely submerged in mud in front of at least 50 people. Another time, I was at a party and barfed in front of dozens of onlookers, without alcohol being involved (or at least without it being prominent). Another candidate: as a dumb teenager unaware of the need to prepare his speeches in advance, I was laughed at by an entire roomful of people at a city council meeting in Boulder. These were all funny and humiliating failures, but I didn’t really learn anything beyond the fact of my being an idiot, which I’d known already.

The mistake I’ll focus on here: at age 14, I traveled 75 miles for a bike race and forgot my cycling shoes. Now, I know that’s not really remarkable—probably every bike racer has done this, or something like it. But that’s just a mistake. The real failure was how I reacted.

Did I melt down, and throw a tantrum, maybe break my hand punching the side of the car? No, actually, I was pretty stoic. In fact, maybe too stoic.

The facts of the case

This was the Buckeye Road Race, the first race of the 1984 season. I was inwardly miserable because I never trained much over the winter in those days and thus always sucked in those early races. I did better as the season progressed (though to be honest, I sucked to some degree all season long, compared to my pals who all improved way faster).

But poor winter training wasn’t my only problem. All races gave me a bad case of nerves; I was pretty much a basket case psychologically at every start line. Just seeing all the parked cars with the bikes on them gave me butterflies. I wasted so much energy being nervous, I never rode as well in the races as I did in training. At least, the fitness gap between my friends and me was more pronounced on race day. My mood would improve afterward when I could finally relax, even though I probably should have been more disappointed in my (generally poor) results.

You might be wondering: why did I even keep racing? Well, as slow as I was in my fourth year of racing, I was at least (gradually) improving. More than that, I just liked the culture of bike racing. I liked the people, I liked bikes, I liked the speed, and I liked the idea of racing. It got me out of the house and gave me a reason—almost an excuse, you might say—to train.

So: back to the Buckeye Road Race. I got there and was going through my stuff when I discovered my cycling shoes were not in my bag. They were Detto Pietro Art 74s, like these:

Back then, there was only one configuration for such shoes—there weren’t 4 or 5 different cleat types making compatibility difficult. The cleat was just a hunk of plastic with a slot in it, which fit over the cage of any pedal. We all had toe clips and in theory I could have raced in sneakers. My shoes were big clunky things, though, and I wasn’t going to do that.

Some adult on my team went running around trying to find somebody who could loan me his shoes (my race being before theirs). I was embarrassed, of course, and didn’t like the idea of anybody taking the trouble. I was well prepared to face the consequences of my neglect.

Too prepared, actually. When it became clear nobody could find shoes my size, I immediately felt a warm flush of relief wash over me. I wouldn’t have to race after all! This was a lot like the warm, cozy sensation of wetting your pants—in that carefree moment before you realize what you’ve done. No sooner did I recognize my emotion—relief—than I became deeply ashamed of it. What the hell was I? A bike racer or a poser? A driven athlete, or a fraud who wasted space in his teammate’s car? What was wrong with me that the pressure of the start line was so great I’d graciously accept being turned away from it through my own disorganization? Why was the embarrassment of a bonehead move like forgetting my shoes less painful than normal pre-race butterflies? Could there have—gasp!—been anything bordering on intentional about my utter lack of meticulousness when packing my bag?

My enlightenment

I can’t really say this shame represented an epiphany of any kind; I didn’t suddenly make any resolution that changed the trajectory of my life, or even my sporting life. But the recognition I’d had was the start of something: I now knew there was a problem somewhere in myself. I no longer just bumped blithely along, buoyed by my friends and my team and the comfortable delusion that I was an actual bike racer (who just didn’t happen to be very good). Up to this point I had bobbed merrily in the baby pool of poser-dom, but now the plug had been pulled. The cycling season gradually drained away and at the end of it, I seriously considered quitting the sport.

Rather than a bolt out of the blue that clarified everything, my failure—that is, the realization that I wasn’t truly committed—festered in my gut like a slow-growing infection. It was just this unpleasant awareness that I hadn’t had  before, that didn’t spur me to any specific action but also wouldn’t go away.

I put a rear rack on my mountain bike and attached cute little caddy to it haul stuff around. I asked myself: is it enough to be a guy who gets around town on a bike? A carefree bike path regular? Could I just bike around for the pleasure of it, without worrying about speed and strength and performance?

Sometime over the winter the answer materialized: no. It wasn’t enough to be a neat guy who likes bikes. I wanted to be a racer, a real one, who doesn’t make excuses and races every chance he gets and pays enough attention not to forget his damn shoes.

This new emotional, psychological commitment—the increase in will—must have changed my behavior in a hundred subtle ways. I trained more; I got more organized; I stopped finding excuses not to ride; I thought a lot less about the rote activities involved and just carried them out; training went from being something I could do to something that had to be done; I tinkered less with my bike. I raced more; my fitness soared; I started getting results. It was the real start of competence in the sport for me.

I was chatting with a pal recently, a fellow assistant mountain bike coach, and we were trying to figure out how many races we’d done. I guessed I’d done over 150, but just now I did a rough tally and it’s actually over 250. And not once, since the 1984 Buckeye Road Race, have I forgotten my shoes. That’s a pretty good track record … and I think it all stems from that one privately humiliating failure: not merely the failure to be organized, but a fundamental failure to commit.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Middle School “Graduation” Speech ... From a Dad

Introduction

I am vaguely aware that there is, coming up, some kind of “graduation” ceremony for my older daughter’s middle school.  I’m still waiting to hear the details, such as when and what this actually is.  One thing I know for certain:  nobody has asked me to give a speech at the event.

The nice thing about being a blogger is that nobody has to ask.  Here is my unsolicited commencement speech for all eighth-graders—and their parents—everywhere.  I encourage you to give this speech at the dinner table tonight, like I’m going to do.

(By the way, this speech is not based on the performance and behaviors of my own eighth-grader, who is perfect.  Everything in here is completely hypothetical and/or archetypal.)

Middle school “graduation” speech ... from a dad

Of course I’ve never given a speech like this before.  I’m not even sure why middle schools have such ceremonies, since middle school is just a stepping-stone anyway.  But I could say the same thing about high school, which has itself become a mere waypoint on the way to college.

As I hope you’ve already heard, middle school (or junior high, as I knew it) is actually the hard part.  If you’ve done a halfway decent job of making the transition from largely irresponsible, clueless child to basically self-sufficient (albeit exasperated) teenager, high school shouldn’t be a difficult transition.  Moreover, kids seem to mellow out in high school, as their brains catch up to their hormone-ravaged bodies.  So, since you matriculating middle-schoolers are all going to be just fine, I’m going to focus this speech on what you can do for your poor parents over the next four years. 

There’s solid precedent for thinking of your parents on this momentous occasion, even when all the fuss seems to be about you.  I suppose at my high school graduation somebody must have given a speech, but I don’t remember it.  What I do remember is what my physics teacher said during the last week of school.  He gave what struck me as kind of the antithesis of a commencement speech.  Here is my best recollection of what he said: 

Look, a lot of fuss is about to be made over all of you. You’ll wear this fancy cap and gown and attend this big ceremony with all these people watching. But don’t get too excited. In the big scheme of things, graduating from high school isn’t that big an achievement. It basically means you showed up for four years. And if you really think about it, most of you could figure out a more fun way to spend your afternoon than dressing up and standing around through a bunch of speeches. Try to appreciate that this ceremony isn’t actually for you. It’s for your parents, and your grandparents, so please honor their ceremony by not decorating your mortarboard with stickers and whatnot, and justifying this misbehavior by saying it’s your ceremony. Instead, behave respectfully, go where you’re told, and try not to do anything to disturb the event. You have the rest of the summer to screw around and do as you please.

Of course, there aren’t any caps or gowns at today’s ceremony, and since kids your age aren’t organized or devious enough to smuggle in beer or inflatable dolls, like the students at my high school graduation did [wait for laughter], I’m going to give you some guidelines on how to advance your development as thinking, considerate, and mature beings in your day-to-day life.  If you follow this advice you might start to feel a bit less anxious about grades, popularity, life changes, and the ten other things that I, as a parent, could never understand.

Guideline #1:  Honor your commitments!  No excuses!

This does not mean “Prioritize your commitments and honor the most important ones.”  It means you should not commit to doing something unless you know you will have the time, resources, ability, discipline, and commitment to do it, as promised and on time.  You must honor every commitment you make, no matter whom you made it to.

When you’re in high school, you will have all kinds of distractions—some of them of the “hanging out” variety, but also a great number of worthy extracurricular activities.  That’s great—but you shouldn’t, say, skip practicing the piano because you have to write a student election speech.  If you cannot honor all your obligations, you are overscheduled and need to scale back.  Commitments come first; leisure comes second.  That said, before committing to something, ensure you will still have time to set aside for leisure.  It’s important, too.

Remember that extracurricular activities shouldn’t be sacrificed at the altar of good grades.  If you’re on a sports team, your teammates rightfully expect a certain level of participation, even if you have a big test coming up (and after all, who doesn’t?).  It is more important to learn to be reliable, balanced, and responsible than to get straight As.  Many great scholars totally wash out in real life, and not all successful people were top students.

There is almost never a good excuse for failing to honor a commitment.  For example, to say “I ran out of time” means a) “I did not manage my time well,” b) “I did not prioritize this commitment to you,” and c) “By making this excuse I am demonstrating a willingness to let this happen again.”  Remember, nobody wants to hear an excuse.  Often, an excuse functions as the opposite of an apology.  It suggests that you’re not holding yourself responsible for your failure.

Guideline #2:  “Own” your problems

You must recognize when something is your problem, and don’t try to make it into your parents’ problem.  Say, for example, you forgot to get up extra early for a student council meeting, and now you’re about to be late for it.  Don’t yell at your mom or dad, “You gotta drive me!  You gotta!”  After all, you made the commitment to attend that early meeting, not your parents.  It is unpleasant and offensive for them to be shrieked at by somebody who has made a mistake and behaves as though it’s his or her parent’s job to fix it.

Sometimes you will fail.  Everybody does.  Fail gracefully, without dragging down the people around you, particularly your parents who suffer (if only silently) whenever you do.  Yes, of course you can always go to your parents to be consoled, but resist the impulse to implicate them in your mistake.  Learn how to accept a setback as stoically as you can; try to learn from it; then move on.

Guideline #3:  Understand the role of your parents

Most of you kids probably dream of having the cool kind of parents, who are a combination of personal assistant, chauffeur, purveyor of booze, and ATM.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not what your parents signed up for.  And all those hundreds of loaded diapers you stuck them with have probably exhausted your parents’ patience.

There are all kinds of ways your parents can support your efforts, but not all of them are actually helpful.  Should they be available to help with homework?  Of course (unless it’s something like calculus that your parents put behind them decades ago).  Is it right for your mom or dad to bend over backwards to get you out of a tough spot, when you’re behind on an assignment due to procrastination and/or disorganization?

Perhaps not.  If they help you out of such a bind, perhaps they’re sending the wrong message, such as “It’s okay to fly by the seat of your pants, since you’ll always have a parent to pick up the slack.”  (You won’t.)  As important as that school assignment seems now, the bigger education is in managing your time.  This never seems obvious in the moment, but it’s better for your mom or dad to let you fail now—and thus learn self-sufficiency the hard way—than for them to leave you stranded later, when you’re truly on your own.

There is more to parenting than helping a child succeed.  A good parent strives to teach his or her child to be helpful to others.  Many of us parents are trying to instill character, which is rarer and more valuable than the ability to succeed. 

Of course this development takes time.  Infants are practically useless; grade-school kids are often clueless; teenagers often feel overwhelmed.  Self-sufficiency is an evolution.  You are now at an age where you can and should be taking on as much as you can:  setting and adhering to your routines, cleaning up after yourself, getting yourself where you need to go, and knowing what to do and when to do it without being reminded.

I hope that most of you have already managed to climb well into the purple tier of the developmental triangle I’ve presented here.  This is a simplistic schematic; the colors should blend m ore, to convey that even before being totally self-sufficient, a person can still be helpful to others. 

Remember that you are not yet an independent adult, free to pursue only what is important to you.  So long as you are dependent on your parents, you should expect them to be involved in setting your priorities.  When you set goals for yourself, work to keep them aligned with the goals your parents have for you.  And when you ask your mom or dad for support, remember that you do not have the big picture; gracefully accept it when the answer is no.

Not all the help your parents give you is solicited; for example, they are justified in giving you unsolicited advice.  That’s part of their job.  And even though you didn’t ask for advice, you’re expected to follow it.  It’s exasperating to your parents when you don’t, and then they have to deal with the consequences ... which brings me to my next guideline, which is a sore point with so many parents.

Guideline #4:  GET ORGANIZED!  STAY ORGANIZED!

Why don’t the greatest mathematicians do everything in their heads?  It’s because they need pencil and paper to organize their thoughts.  Why was written language invented?  It’s because oral communication is too imprecise, unreliable, and ungainly.  Writing something down frees your brain up for bigger, better thoughts, while keeping tasks from being forgotten.  As your life continues to get more complicated it will be impossible for you to honor all your commitments without systematically recording what is due and when.  So get a pocket calendar you can bring to school with you.  Record your commitments in it.  Keep it handy.  Look it over frequently.  Document deadlines well in advance.  Check things off as you complete them.

This calendar is only one of your tools.  Figure out everything you’ll need and keep it handy.  I’m talking about your wristwatch, your textbook, your homework, that permission slip, your house key, your gym shorts, your glasses, and the ten other things that I as a parent hope to be blissfully unaware of because they’re your problem, not mine.

Imagine if David had shown up to duel Goliath and forgot his sling:  “Dude, I couldn’t find my weapon, we’ll have to reschedule.”  That’s not gonna happen.  Goliath’s gonna kick your ass.  So, select a single best place in your home to store each of your life tools, and store them only in this place!  If you leave these tools lying around, they will be in people’s way, and they’ll get squirreled away and/or buried, and you won’t have them when you need them ... and then, if you complain to your parents about this, well, you’re in clear violation of Guideline #2 above.  (Don’t tell me you forgot Guideline #2!  Pay attention, there’ll be a test later!)

Guideline #5:  Figure out guidelines of your own

I don’t claim to be some world authority on all this.  Perhaps the most important skill for you to develop is a sense of being in charge of your own life, becoming self-sufficient, and figuring out—usually when something doesn’t work—what you need to do to become more effective.  Periodically step back, look at your life, and ask the question, “How can I make this work better?  What is falling through the cracks?  How can I keep that from happening?”  If you create the right habits and systems, you will get more done and avoid all kinds of strife as you go along.

I’ll leave you with this refreshingly non-didactic thought:  as systematic and prescriptive as all this seems, everybody is just winging it, and that’s okay.  You’re all amateurs.  There’s no such thing as a professional high-schooler, and if there were, we’d see all kinds of malpractice suits.