inbox zero

Haven’t been spending as much time online recently, and lots of things have been neglected – especially my email inbox.

Today when I opened Gmail there were 8592 messages total, 4634 of them were unread.

Most of them are just advertising or newsletters I no longer have the time to read. Some are probably borderline spam. It’s time to have a spring clean though and get it back to zero.

Started: 58, 21 “unread”
Ended: 7, 0 unread. Not bad!

Ack, I should have started this one before the hotmail. I had a few overdue bills lurking in there. I took this opportunity to set them up on auto-pay.

The ones that are left in there are either reminders for things or actions that I need to do. I should really get both of those out of there and into a more GTD-kosher storage place. I’m pretty GTD-ish at work, but I could really benefit from implementing it at home, too.

I’m pretty good about this at work, but my personal email accounts are a mess. They’re just overwhelming.

Hotmail is at 210 emails, 27 “unread” (ha ha, should be “avoiding”)

...

Later: now down to 123 emails, 14 unread. I moved 8 to a new write_to folder – for purely social correspondence that doesn’t have any other tasks associated with it. I didn’t skip over anything else! The newest emails in my inbox are now from July 22. Yay! Feels good to move on this.

It used to be so simple.

My job has gone through several major changes in the last few years. Now it’s a nasty mix of team leader and system administrator with lots of things in-between.

I start emptying my inbox, clarifying (or quickly deleting) each item according to solid GTD practices (Thank you, David Allen), and either wind up wrapped around the axle on something silly or realizing that I’ve got something more important to do.

This time it’s going to be different.

I’ll be done before Monday. :-D

—Jerry

this is another one of those things that helps remind me i’m human and prone to repeated failure! :-) i had another little breakthrough, thanks to the person who got me interested in GTD stuff. i was letting my inbox slip because it just created a monster task list that was now unmanageable. trying some things to fix that.

i’ve been circling around this goal for about six months and have finally gotten my email inbox down to zero and feel like i just might have gotten my head around the processing that it’ll take to keep it that way…definitely the hardest part.