Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've known the Agony of Defeat often enough when it comes to the sport of e-mail balancing, but today I glory in a victory:  My Inbox is empty.

That's rare enough, but not enough to merit a blog post.  Although it seems to balloon to over 100 e-mails with unconscionable ease, and sad to say even 300 if I blink, I can usually whack it down to manageable size, even briefly zero, with a little sustained effort.  And some cheating.

You see, I have this other folder called Awaiting Action, a kind of alter ego for my Inbox.  When I’m hacking through the e-mail overgrowth and come to an item I can’t deal with immediately, I move it into Awaiting Action.  This keeps me from becoming discouraged and giving up, which is a good thing, but organizationally it’s the equivalent of clearing house clutter before company comes by throwing things higgledy-piggledy into a box and stuffing the box into a closet.

Like that box in the closet, it’s out of sight, out of mind, easy to ignore until the next clean up spree when one opens the closet door to deposit yet another box.  Yet it’s not really out of mind; I don’t know about you, but such boxes—real and virtual—haunt my subconscious, the nagging discomfort of things “left undone which we ought to have done.”

This weekend I was inspired—perhaps by Porter, whose e-mail deluge makes mine look like a drippy faucet—to open the closet door.  My Awaiting Action box contained items that had been waiting since 2005.  It had sprouted several subfolders, as if organization could substitute for action, and the contents of each had grown apace.  I picked up my best Ponce de Leon machete and plunged in.

The subfolders are now gone.  The contents of Awaiting Action now fill a mere half page on my screen.  I hope to do better still, but at a more gradual pace, since the remaining e-mails involve projects, some of considerable magnitude, that are not suited to machete-style work.  “Good enough is better than perfect,” and indeed some of the projects are of too low a priority to merit much effort right now.  Nonetheless, I’m determined not to let this box grow beyond a page—no scroll bars allowed.

In the process I reorganized and simplified my e-mail folders, taking better advantage of Thunderbird’s expanded tagging and filtering options.  I like it!  More than that, I hope the new system will help me stay on top of my e-mail at last.  Posting about it is part of the effort, too, providing Accountability, as they say in the 12-step biz.  Feel free to come back and ask me how I’m doing as the days, weeks, and months pass.

Now about that closet….

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