The Touch it Once Rule: As soon as you touch something, act on it at once.

Let’s open this up a little:

• “Touch” – Of course, this applies to everything that comes into our field of awareness, not just things we can literally touch.
• “Something” – This can be a demand or request, a task, a piece of mail or a message, a bit of news or an update, a job relating to a project, a chore, or an invitation.
• “Act” – This could mean completing the task fully or identifying and planning the next actionable step to take, for example scheduling a time block the following day to tackle it.

Thinking again about that simple task that landed on your desk, you can imagine that every time you think, “Oh yeah, I have that thing I need to do,” you are setting up a tiny speedbump in your thought process and taking away from your focus in the present.

Several days and a ton of stress later, you still haven’t done the task… but you’ve “touched” it a dozen times!

The upgraded version:

• A simple task lands on your desk
• You look at it and think, “Huh, I need to respond to this.”
• You respond
• The End

You touch it once, so that you don’t have to touch it again.

You can see the irony: In procrastinating certain boring or unenjoyable tasks, we actually amplify them in our world, and draw them out so they last way, way longer.

The Touch It Once Principle is a flowchart disguised as a mindset.

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