Although I’ve bene quite successful for years at keeping my inbox to fewer than 20 messages at any one time, I have to confess I’ve been having a lot of trouble with this, especially in the last few months. Caught up in an endless loop of going from one crisis to another, I just haven’t seemed to have much time to sit down and catch my breath, never mind keep my inbox at a manageagable level and the effects are sadly showing in missed deadlines.
More than once I’ve had 100+ messages pending in my inbox. Even today, as I type, I have 64 messages waiting for me to do something with them, whether that’s “Junk” it, file it, or deal with it and file it. Why should this be so hard, you ask? I do receive more mail than the average person and definitely more spam than the average person as a result of holding down multiple roles (technical support, domain registrar, Ph.D. student, university lecturer, friend, technology advisor). According to Eudora, I receive 12, 145 messages on average per month, of which about 74% is spam. Of that 74% that’s spam, half of that is tagged as spam automatically by SpamCop and Eudora, but I’m manually junking the other half. Hmmm! That might explain a lot! I’m manually junking just under 4500 messages a month!
Nevertheless, I still need to reduce the amount of mail sitting in my inbox. Some of it, I notice, is mail I need to habitually do something with, like search report results from Atomz For these, I’m going to write some new Eudora rules to auto-file them. I don’t actually need to read them—I just need to be able to get at the information later, if it’s required. Done. That should make a small dent and I should look for others too. Master the mail!
See more progress on: keep my inbox to only 20 messages
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Sep 050 comments