Fragmented working is something we’ve all been guilty of—maybe you’re even doing it right now. It shows up in subtle yet disruptive ways, like starting to type an email but then opening a new tab halfway through and beginning another quest. When you return to the email, you have to reprocess the task: Who is this email for, and what were you trying to accomplish?
If you’re guilty of this, then a trip to “OHIO” can help. The OHIO acronym stands for only handle it once. This productivity technique is free to use, and the payoff is immediate.
Like most 21st-century professionals, I feel like I’ve tried every productivity trick in the book. Nothing has had a more immediate impact on my work anxiety than the OHIO principle. Let’s look at what this technique is and how you can enjoy its benefits.
What is the OHIO principle?
The OHIO (only handle it once) principle was popularized by financial executive Robert Pozen in his book Extreme Productivity.
Pozen introduces OHIO this way: “This means tackling your low-priority items immediately when you receive them, if possible. If you let a backlog develop, you will waste a lot of time and increase your anxiety level.”
It’s a simple yet profound concept: Avoid handling a task multiple times, like checking your inbox before bed with the intention of responding to emails tomorrow. Pozen touches on two benefits: productivity and mental health. Let’s look more closely at each of them.
Productivity
You may have heard of the popular two-minute rule, which states that any task that can be completed in two minutes should be completed immediately. This rule and the OHIO method have overlapping DNA, but OHIO takes a wider aim at the issue at hand: Why allow any task to linger and risk being forgotten? It offers a sense of control over areas of our work that feel overwhelming.
Mental health
Fragmenting tasks is like keeping too many browser tabs open in your mind, creating mental clutter and adding undue stress. The OHIO principle is a preventive measure against cognitive overload.
Even small tasks expand when not immediately handled. Think about how many times you’ve read a text message but decided to respond to it later. You might think, “I can’t forget to respond to that message,” 10 times before actually doing it. This means that you mentally picked up and put down that text message repeatedly.
A small to-do multiplies with every thought of it, filling up your mental space like a bowl overflowing with popping popcorn kernels. These unfinished tasks take up even more mental space than completed tasks, a phenomenon called the “Zeigarnik Effect.” Understanding the power that incomplete tasks have over us can help expose the real impact of procrastination and enforce the OHIO method.
Work-life balance
Beyond mental health and productivity, the OHIO principle can also help improve work-life balance by minimizing microbursts of work after hours. Microbursts of work at home can be subconscious, like opening your email inbox while watching Netflix with no intention of responding immediately. The OHIO principle reduces distraction and disruption while sharpening the invaluable tool of self-awareness.
Try removing work apps from your personal devices to eliminate the temptation to work during your off-hours. If this isn’t an option, put your devices in another room or fine-tune your phone’s “do not disturb” settings so that personal messages may come through, but work messages stay out of sight and out of mind.
Making the OHIO principle work for you
Pick a specific task that you’ll try applying the OHIO method to. Some ideas include:
- Writing and sending a meeting summary immediately after a meeting concludes
- Filing your work expenses on the last workday of the month
- Naming and sorting files immediately as you work so nothing sits in limbo in your downloads folder
After you’ve chosen your task, choose a time to work on it. Chantel Cohen, licensed clinical social worker and founder and CEO of CWC Coaching & Therapy, encourages you to start your day with the OHIO principle to double-dip on the benefits.
“Handle it first thing in the morning so that you can manage your energy and get the mental boost as well as the emotional boost,” Cohen shared. “Only… handling it once [is] really, really powerful because we start talking about it as not just a time management tool but an energy management tool.”
How not to use the OHIO principle
As powerful as this is, the OHIO principle can squander energy and create a whack-a-mole way of working if applied to the wrong tasks.
For example, you may want to apply this to your phone notifications and respond to everything immediately. However, that’s a time-consuming task. A study by musicMagpie found that people receive enough phone notifications each day to average out to one every 10 minutes. Immediate action on every notification you get would wreak havoc on your time management. It would be more fruitful to save all phone notifications for one designated time (also known as “batching”).
While this method can’t be applied unilaterally to every task, the beauty is that it can be customized to fit your needs and have an enormous impact.
The state of Ohio has many claims to fame, like being the birthplace of aviation and home to the world’s largest basket. Now, when you think of the Buckeye State, you’ll also remember the weight of unfinished tasks—and the instant satisfaction of managing them.
Photo by Just Life/Shutterstock.com
