Popping the stack

Popping the stack is a productivity technique I practice, which is also present in many productivity systems. Essentially, it involves processing your pile of open items, where “open items” can mean various things. For example, you might have numerous open applications on your laptop. Popping the stack in this context means going through these applications and closing those that no longer need to be open or worked on. In email management, a common system is the zero-inbox system. This works similarly, involving processing each email and deciding the appropriate action, whether it’s archiving or something else. In the ‘Getting Things Done’ process, popping the stack is akin to processing your inbox, deciding whether to act on an item, file it, or move it to a list.

In my personal workflows, I pop the stack in several ways:

1. closing open applications at the end of the day
2. Closing open browser tabs as either: no loner needed, “read later” which I save into Readwise Reader, “take an action later” I move it into my TODO workflow in Org mode.