keep my e-mail inboxes under control

242 now

It was over 250 this morning (probably about 267). I’ve got it down to 220 now, and trying to get it down further.

Personal inbox is at 228.
No work, let alone work inbox, right now, so I can forget about that one for a while.

I’d like to keep my gmail inbox under 100 messages. It’s currently at 158.
I have to think of a goal for my work one. I think it’s 600 amd something.

I’ve managed to keep my three active email inboxes clean and not full of junk for six months now. My two Gmail accounts have only rarely gone over 50 messages in the inbox (usually when I didn’t read mail for a while), and I kept them clean by basically using the criterion of whether or not I had to reply to it or was waiting for something (like, the shipping notification of a package I was expecting). My work email I used the same criterion with the exception that I got better at filing away things for reference and deleting stuff I didn’t need.

It’s really much nicer to have a clean inbox. :)

I have a tendency to receive an email, mentally file it as “will respond later,” and go on to the next. This inevitably leads to piles of email that will never be looked at again, plus a sense of quiet desperation about how I have all this “stuff” to “deal with,” and “I don’t know how I’ll ever catch up on all that.”

I changed jobs, which helped a lot – I used to (literally; I was postmaster at a large site) receive roughly 2500-4000 messages on an average day, nearly all of which was useless but still had to be sifted through. Now I receive fewer than a hundred work emails per day, probably 60% of which are immediately deletable. Nearly all the rest can be deleted after skimming. The remainder get categorized as “delete at end of day,” responded to and deleted, or .. well, sometimes I still let things linger, but usually I go on a cleaning tizzy every two weeks or so and get it down to fewer than 25 messages. This is a vast improvement over my old 3000+ typical work inbox.

And as for my two personal accounts – well, I try to get signed off of the things I signed up for but don’t actually care about (various vendors’ promotional lists, etc. – I get roughly 10-12 announcements a day of that sort), and then honestly I hit ‘select all unread,’ de-select anything I actually care about (messages from a friend, etc), and hit ‘Archive.’ If I’m not going to respond to it, it doesn’t get to live in the inbox. Period.

It’s draconian and sometimes you really have to force yourself to do it (which seems counterintuitive, but it’s true) but it really does pay off in terms of not having a huge pile of baggage dragging you down every time you look at it.

So my goal is to stick with this for another six months, and make it a habit to have a clean inbox. We’ll see!

It’s surprising how much more peaceful an e-mail inbox looks when it is empty! It isn’t always the case, but I’ve done really well at keeping my two e-mail inboxes down to fewer than five e-mails. I’ve also become better at dealing with e-mails as soon as they arrive. So this was definitly worth doing!

I’m managing well at the moment, both inboxes are down to just a few e-mails at the moment that are there for a reason.

It is my intention to keep both my E-mail inbox at work and my personal Hotmail inbox down to 5 E-mails or so, which would be ones that need imminent attention. Anything else should be deleted or filed, and I should periodically go through the folders to make sure that I need to keep everything.