It’s been nearly 24 hours, and the inbox has been at zero all day. I got a little obsessive, but I’m OK with that. Then I went to a track meet for five hours. When I got home, the inbox had 34 e-mails in it. Time to dig in and process away.

I figured I’d post this update for a couple of reasons. First off, I need to keep my inbox cleaned up, and if I get you interested in it, you’ll start asking how I’m doing. That will create peer pressure for me. Even if you don’t ask, I’ll imagine that you’re thinking about it. It’s really the digital equivalent of a white glove test when you go into somebody’s house. “Hmmmmm, how clean is his inbox…let’s check”.

I’m also trying out a different processing style now that I’ve got things a bit more under control. There are some e-mails that immediately get trashed. They’re not really junk mail, but usually from folks (often advertisers) who I don’t need to hear from at the moment. These are definitely e-mails that I want to keep getting, and for whatever reason I want to process them manually rather than automatically sequester them in a folder for deferred processing. Of my 34 e-mails, there were eight of those. Eight down, 26 to go.

Next were several e-mails from folks I don’t want to hear from again. I opened them and unsubscribed. It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve realized that I can’t read everything, so something has to go. Funny how Let It Go from Frozen keeps popping into my brain. The folks who will be terribly disappointed to lose me as a subscriber have to simply accept that I’ve let them go. I’m not coming back anymore. [ed. note STOP IT, this isn’t really that funny]

Then there were some e-mails that needed to be auto-processed and put into deferred processing folders. Those got filters attached and were deposited into their requisite folders for later managing. Of course, I’m actually going to have to do that, but that’s a post for another day!

Then there were some e-mails that were pretty much standalone. I read them, then either trashed or archived them. Oddly enough, only one e-mail that I got in this batch needed anything close to a response. This group (not really all that strange for late on a Friday night), were all about e-mails that I needed to consume.

Trashing, unsubscribing, auto-processing, and manual-processing. All tasks that needed to be done. And the 34 e-mails were processed in about 6 minutes (give or take a few minutes because I kept stopping to write this blog post). I’m not going to get all accountant-like and run the numbers on the effectiveness of this processing…well, I actually am, but I’m going to use a larger sample. You’ve been warned.

But once again, I’m heading to bed with an Inbox Zero state for my e-mail. That makes me happy.

Sleep well…I know I’m going to!