All of my “summer” vacations and visitors this year are falling between the end of April and June. I just spent my only weekend in town and without visitors over a 6 week stretch, so I’m feeling the need to get my life back in order!
As part of my Productivity Experiment, I’m spending this Monday afternoon (and possibly part of Wednesday afternoon as well) purging e-mail. A few weeks ago I spent a few afternoons purging paper with my new favorite toy.
I used to be pretty good about keeping a zero inbox. Not following any theory, but just by deleting or archiving after responding, and making sure to delete junk or “read & delete” emails on arrival.
Now, I do actually have a filter set up to label these “read & delete,” and other tags that basically mean the same thing, like “networking events” and “news.” (For those of you without gmail or google apps, this is like setting up rules and folders). It definitely helps me get to the important emails, but the emails getting skipped are also building up. This gets to my complaints about dailies… the less important things in life that you have to deal with periodically to keep them from getting out of control.
I feel like I’m spending some “me” time, but with work. It’s kinda nice.
I’m playing the Merlin Mann video in the background right now… “Today, I feel like if you’re going to succeed at a job, one of the most important soft skills you can have is dealing with a high volume of email.” . . . “Always process to zero. Never check your email without processing.”
