If you spend any bit of time on blogs or books aimed at helping you be more organized or efficient, you've heard it before...Empty your email inbox every day. It's the equivalent of handling just once each piece of paper that comes into your house. Either file it in the place you will look for it, act on it, refer it to whomever is really responsible for it, or trash it. Sound familiar? Otherwise you just end up endlessly shuffling paper. Or shuffling through your inbox, as the case may be. I have far more organizing tips and strategies tucked in my brain than I have time to execute. This "emptying of the inbox" was one of them.
Was. No more past tense. After today, it's a reality. That's right...I am operating from an empty inbox. Granted, I had to create of file of "REPLY TO" emails, and it contains about 20 messages that I need to reply to/act on the info in them. The rest of the messages are either forwarded then deleted, filed appropriately, or deleted. I would have preferred to act on those 20 messages as I worked, rather than filing them and having to go back to them to act on them. But desperate times call for modified measures. That's right...this was an act of desperation.
Maybe I'm hoping that other people actually have twice as many emails in their inbox as I had, or that this will inspire someone else to purge their email to help make room for mental clarity, or maybe I think announcing this turn of a new leaf will help me stick to it. Regardless, this is why this is a big deal to me: I had 233 emails in my inbox as of this morning. That's right...233. Or maybe that's not so bad. Either way, I'm feeling like I actually accomplished something today. My goal is to spend just a 15-30 minute block a day handling emails, and then be done with it for the day. I'm working on a similar goal for blogging, once I work through my backlog of pics. There's just too much to do to not be organized about it.
So I'm curious...how many emails are in your inbox?
4 comments:
that is A LOT of email!! yikes :)
i usually have about 20-ish a day (about 1/3 from facebook), and if i don't go through them daily, i do get overwhelmed. i aim for a quick looksee in the morning, and a more thorough one at night. i don't respond to them all that same day, though. keeping up with emails and a blog (and facebook which sucks me in) on top of daily life is hard! :)
Um... 890. :-| lol! But!, almost all of them can be filed away. I even have a filing system, and it works (amazing concept). I just need to actually FILE. (another amazing concept)
15-30 minute block? Oh wow! You must be a fast typist. That's so good though. Unfortunately when I write a real heavy duty email (ahem, not that you have ever seen one of mine... er.. at least not since last week), it can take me a full hour or more!
You are definitely inspiring though I think I'll start in baby steps and just work on that filing business first. :-)
Jen, I KNEW someone else would make me feel better about my inbox! Thanks so mucc-lol!
And the 15-30 min block? That's why I had to create the "reply to" file...but I don't have "heavy duty" emails to write that often. Umm, you know, how often do we write? :)
332... After the spam blocker "files" ~50% of it for me. I work on the once a week/once a month cleanout philosophy... you can see that it's not exactly working for me... of course since I share it with Craig, I can blame it on him.
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