Empty Your Email Inbox
by Lela Davidson on February 19, 2008
in Uncategorized
A while back I decided to clear my email inbox every Friday afternoon. And by clear, I meant get it down to one page, or 25 messages in my system. It made me feel better, but there were still a few problems:
1. Friday afternoon is not the time to tie up loose ends. It’s the time for cocktails.
2. As soon as I got one more email, my page was back up over one page again.
3. All those 25 messages taunted me.
Then last night I heard again about this geeky thing called GTD – Getting Things Done. Apparently there is a book, several websites, and an entire MOVEMENT devoted to OCD organization. Ah, Nirvana. So I checked it out and found this life-changing article on how to manage the email inbox.
It’s been a whopping twelve hours and I’m not quite sure what to do with all the extra energy I used to spend on feeling guilty every time I looked at my inbox. All I did was create two extra folders: one for Action items, and one for Correspondence (stuff I want to take a little time with, to ‘chat’ with friends or family). If an email comes in that requires an action that will take more than 2 minutes, it goes into a folder. The rest get taken care of right away. Voila – empty inbox.
Why didn’t I think of that, write the book, and build the website? Oh yeah, I was too busy staring at my inbox!
