A PDF lands. You stop what you're doing, open it, decide what to do, half-do it, go back to your work. Twenty minutes later, another lands. By 5pm, you've lost two hours to context-switching and you've still got six PDFs unprocessed.
Batch it. One window a day. Twenty minutes. Done.
Set a daily PDF window
Pick a 20-minute slot — we like the end of the morning, just before lunch. That's your PDF window. Everything that lands in `/Inbox/PDFs` waits until then. Notifications off, browser tab open, work through the queue.
The shift is psychological as much as practical. Once PDFs are batch work, they stop interrupting deep work.
Queue, don't react
When a PDF arrives mid-day, the only action is save it to the inbox folder. Don't open it, don't decide, don't reply. Save and move on. Treat it like an email you'll triage later.
If the PDF is genuinely urgent (rare), the sender will say so or call. Otherwise, it can wait three hours.
Process in one pass
When the window opens, open the inbox folder. Work top to bottom. For each PDF: rename it, do whatever it needs (sign, compress, merge, redact), and file it. Move to the next.
The rhythm matters more than perfection. Fast decisions, small batches, no overthinking. The whole inbox empties in 15–25 minutes typically.
Handle the awkward ones in a side queue
Some PDFs need a decision you can't make in 60 seconds. Create a `/Inbox/PDFs/_pending` folder. Anything that needs more thought goes there during the batch, and gets revisited at the next window.
The pending folder should never have more than 5 files. If it does, you're avoiding a decision and need to make it.
FAQ
Doesn't batching slow down urgent responses?
Genuinely urgent PDFs are rarer than they feel. For the 1 in 50 that needs same-hour attention, process it ad-hoc. The 49 others wait until the window.
How long should the daily window be?
15–25 minutes for most knowledge workers. If you process more, the volume is too high — consider whether you actually need all those PDFs in the first place.
What if I work across multiple inboxes (email, Slack, etc.)?
All paths funnel to one folder: `/Inbox/PDFs`. Save email attachments there, screenshot-to-PDF Slack messages there, drag downloads there. One queue to process.
Can I run this with a team?
Yes, with one tweak: shared team PDFs go to a shared `/Inbox/PDFs` folder, and one person owns the daily window. Or rotate weekly. The point is single ownership of the queue at any moment.
Reactive PDF work costs you hours; batch processing saves them. Process today's inbox in Flint and time yourself — most people clear 15 PDFs in 20 minutes.