tame my inbox

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.”

I’ve done a thorough cleaning of my feedreader and am now down to a mere 872 unread items (down from over 22,000). I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t think it’s a train!

I’m also including my RSS feeds in this task.

I’ve got way too much data coming in and not enough time to process it all. I’ve got a dozen domains, all with separate mail accounts and my main mail account gets thousands of spam a day. I’m combatting spam using a combination of SpamCop, Spam Assassin, POPfile, and filtering in The Bat!. But I’m still swimming in it and have got to formulate a way to get it under control.

Inbox Zero has some good ideas to work from.