I’ve trimmed down my RSS feeds significantly. The other day, I had it down to under 200 items. So, I’d say my feeds are tamed.
At home, I decided to take all 3,900 e-mails (except for three) in the inbox of my main e-mail account and dump them into a “read – unsorted” folder so they were out of my face. I’m slowly and steadily sorting through them as I have time. A few days later, my inbox still has only three items in it. The three keys to success will be:
- Creating a new “replied mail” filter for every person I regularly get e-mail from. This way, as soon as I reply to a message, it’s automatically dumped into the proper archive folder.
- Before bed each night, make sure that all other e-mail in the inbox is sorted. Much of it I may have replied to at work, so is hand-sorted. Mailing lists should be dumped into the mailing lists folder. And only e-mail requiring a response or other action will be left in the inbox.
- Replying right away to e-mails that only require a few sentence response. I’ve always been pretty poor with this, but this GTD technique should be very handy.
So, as long as my inbox is still tamed a week from now, I’ll mark this task as “done.”
