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….
So was it Randy Pausch that inspired you?
I watched his time management lecture, but have not yet watched his full "Last Lecture".
He certainly helped. I figure if HE can keep an empty inbox....
I have a folder called "revisit" for e-mail that doesn't require immediate action but I should probably get back to eventually. It never happens. It now has about 100 messages dating back to 2004.
But I do clear my inbox from time to time.
If you can't keep it under one page, take a hint from the pros: make your font smaller. ;-)
"keep your font smaller", nice.
I wondered how you could possibly have an empty inbox, but now I can understand, with the awaiting action folder, definitely cheating.
I leave everything in my inbox, and I do try to keep it on one page (only 37 emails on my laptop screen - I think I had a chance when I used the desktop more). I am currently failing miserably with 83 emails... First email is from October 2004, I do really intend to write back eventually...
No one's holding my feet to the fire on this, but I'll write an update anyway, for me if no one else. It's been two months, and so far I'm pleased with the system. I even started occasionally using my inbox as a to-do list, sending myself e-mails about jobs I wanted to get to, knowing I would work extra hard to keep the inbox clear.
Recently I almost lost it, though, with both the Awaiting Action folder and the inbox getting dangerously close to needed a smaller font to stay on one page. It's amazing how the problem snowballs (an expression left over from my Northern days). I received a few e-mails that I couldn't deal with right away, and yet which I thought were too important even to move to the out-of-sight Awaiting Action folder. That was a mistake, because losing the visual effect of an empty inbox broke the system, and e-mails that I previously would have dealt with within a day began piling up. An effort of will over the past couple of days brought things back under control, with the inbox empty and the AA folder down to 20. Unfortunately, the latter is not likely to get much smaller any time soon, because of the amount of work involved in the remaining items, but that's okay, that's what the folder is for. When I keep the actual inbox empty, I find I have more incentive to work on the AA folder as well.
I'll check in again in another two months....
It has been slightly over two months, and I can report great success...until now. Being on vacation for two weeks definitely threw a spanner into the works. My inbox is at a manageable six, but Awaiting Action has spilled slightly over one page with 45. Still, I'm not worried, as I hope to be able to whittle that down fairly quickly now that I'm home, and the situation would be much, much worse had I not been able to attend to many of the e-mails while on the road.
AA down to 18, Inbox empty! Now to attend to other neglected things....
Aaargh. Being away from home for over a month definitely plays havoc with the system. Inbox=96, Awaiting Action=47. :(
Still, it's much better than if I hadn't taken my computer with me.
[Groan] And going away again after only two weeks at home has taken its toll, too: Inbox 61, Awaiting Action 86. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....
