Back in Business School, or anywhere else you may have learned about operations, you were likely introduced to FIFO and LIFO. When dealing with batch processing, like fulfilling orders, FIFO stands for “First In, First Out” and LIFO stands for “Last In, First Out”. FIFO means that the orders are processed in order of their arrival. The first order in is the first one processed. LIFO means that the last order in is the first one processed.

As I go through my emails every day - and since so much of my work is electronic communication - I can’t help but think not only of order fulfillment, but also of how I’d like to best approach it. I find myself quickly triaging emails and assigning action phrases to them. (I can do this because I use a quirky, but neat email tool called First Class.) Once my emails have action items assigned — notes like “Reply!” “Do!” “Read!” —, I nearly almost address and thus respond to the ones that require the least effort first. In other words, I do the easiest ones first.

I’ve tended to think about this as going after the, “low hanging fruit,” which I suppose is another way to describe a very similar approach. But thinking back to our four-lettered acronym friends, I thought… how about EIFO? As you noticed from the title of this posting, I propose that this stand for “Easiest In, First Out”.

With the easiest tasks out of the way, I’m free to focus on the more complex and time-consuming ones without being distracted by the stress of several other tasks outstanding for my attention. So if you’re like me and want to get these ‘easy’ tasks out of the way first also — and even if you’re not — I recommend leveraging the term EIFO.

If nothing else, it’s an easy way to refer to this concept. And if it catches-on, say in 30 years… well, maybe I can get that Nobel Prize I’ve always been wanting.