It doesn't work!

[cwoodgold]

And only the urgent things ever got done.

That's not a very bad outcome. It could even be kindof good, though probably not the best.

... When I get to my own notes, there's a sense of relaxation, even relief. Although there are projects and actions of all sizes in there, the familiarity provides a comfort.

Ah. Perhaps the principle here is processing scariest-first. (Or dreariest-first.) I'll think about that. I tend to just take from the top of the pile.

That's like a method of learning music: you learn the last bit of the piece first, then the second-last, and so on. That way, any time you practice what you know so far you're going from less familiar into more familiar territory, so it feels comforting.

Actually, going quickly through the inbox could be an every-day practice: quickly looking at each thing just to see what's there, which might only take a second or two per item, then afterwards processing the things one at a time. This achieves the feeling of familiarity and comfort, a sense of security from knowing how urgent the most urgent thing in there is, and perhaps a very rough estimate of how much time it's all going to take, which can help in portioning the time between items, for example changing the two-minute rule to a one-minute or five-minute rule for that day. I may be moving towards doing that, but can't always resist getting caught up in actually processing or actually doing -- which can be OK too, since that's what I would have been doing anyway if I hadn't set out to quickly look over the stuff.