It’s been two months since I started on my journey of Inbox Zero. In my first post, I sounded just like somebody getting ready for a new job or one of the kids getting ready for a new school year. You know, that my-shoes-are-new, my-supplies-are-new, I’m-going-to-do-everything-right feeling that you get at the start of any new adventure. At that time, I had 14,416 e-mails in my inbox and they were just sitting there, mocking me. I didn’t know what I had, let alone if there was really anything in there that needed my immediate attention. Although I “live” in my e-mail daily, I was struggling to just keep up with the influx of new e-mails. My greatest fear was that something was slipping through the cracks and getting missed. Not just mundane stuff, but rather important things. It happens all the time in my hectic life, and having 14,416 e-mails was just an example of where a lot of important things could be hiding.
So I attacked the problem. I started processing. in both that first post and the next one, I documented my journey about processing the e-mail backlog. Before I wrote today’s post, I went back and read those posts. It’s funny, but the first one seems kind of “magical”. The kind of magic that you see in a movie that’s trying to convey a sense of time. Something like that shot of a tree outside a window, and the leaves change on the tree while the view inside the windows changes as well. From the first hint to Spring with new buds and a family gathering to Summer and the 4th of July celebration to Fall and Halloween decorations in the window to Winter with its snow and Christmas decorations within the house. In a matter of minutes the scene changes convey a vast expanse of time. That first post was like that. While it only takes a couple minutes to read, the time was passing by hours in chunks as I processed those e-mails.
That post was written on May 3rd, 2014. I was obviously both excited and apprehensive about the journey towards Inbox Zero. I was mostly apprehensive because I’d created an accountability partner in Jeff Stephens of the CrazyDadLife podcast and website. I knew that if I didn’t get the job done, Jeff would be all over me. I also knew that I couldn’t use the excuse “I was busy” with him. His crazy is my hectic and vice-versa. So I was going to have to be accountable to somebody who could relate to exactly what my life was like.
More of the magic is displayed in the second blog post about the process. I summed up two days worth of work processing over 11,000 e-mails in one sentence “It’s been nearly 24 hours, and the inbox has been at zero all day“. It really does sound like magic. It’s as if I waved my magic wand (Oak with a Dragon-heartstring for a core, if you must know LOL) and all the e-mails summarily went where they were supposed to go. The reality is that I really did get obsessive about the process and worked like crazy. I would work on my computer. When I was eating I worked on processing e-mail on my iPad. When I went to pickup my daughter from school, I processed e-mail on my phone while I was in the parking lot waiting for her.
By the end of that blog post, you’d probably read more than enough of the nitty-gritty to begin your own journey to Inbox Zero, if you’re not already there. But of course, I was getting obsessive about this, so I had to write another post about my progress. This one came one-week after starting the process. This one has a bit more of the process documented, so it’s not quite as magical as the first two, but there is a bit of magic involved. Let’s face it, in that blog post I talk about processing through over 100+ e-mails during a day when I was actually pretty busy with other stuff. All the e-mail processing was done while I was waiting for somebody to arrive, most of it done from my phone while waiting in the car. That’s pretty much dead time anyway, so I wasn’t even stealing time from anybody else. Just being a bit more productive than normal.
At that point, I talked about creating a strategy for achieving Office Zero, but that’s the topic for another post (or know me, series of posts). Today I want to focus on where I am two months after starting on the road to Inbox Zero.
First off, I’m at Inbox Zero (almost) at this very moment. I’m have two e-mails in my inbox that haven’t been placed into a subfolder. One is about a half marathon in September that I need to sign up for. The other is an e-mail from my Mom about all the things that she needs done on her car at the service place. I need to get that scheduled with them, and I’m afraid I will forget.
You see, I’ve discovered that one issue I personally have with Inbox Zero is that once an e-mail is out of my inbox, it’s clearly a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. I’ve created several folders in my structure that I need to go to and further act on the e-mails in them, but I have a really bad tendency not to do that. It’s gotten me bitten (ok, maybe nipped rather than actually bitten) a couple times in the past two months. Things have almost slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, nothing really big has done so.
To address the problem, I’m trying to get myself to the point where I can use a task management program to help me with the things that need to be done. The most important thing for me is that I need to track a lot of stuff. I’m no different than anybody else, I have a lot of tasks that I need to keep track of. What makes me a tad different is that I’m really compulsive about it. And I’ve got a lot of kids that I’m also trying to help along with lots of things going on in their lives. I’m working on letting them do a lot of their own tracking, but I’m not 100% to the point where I don’t have this need to check up on them. So…lots of things to do, lots of deferred tasks, and lots of delegated tasks. It makes for a mess sometimes. OK, it makes for a mess most of the time. So I keep trying to throw technology solutions into the mix to see if I can do this better than trying to keep it all in my head.
I’ve been working with ToodleDo for a while as my task management system. It fits well with David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework, and the concepts of the system as well as this specific tool really appeal to me. I can use ToodleDo across all my platforms (Macintosh, Windows, iPad, and iPhone), so it’s available anywhere that I might be. I’m still struggling with the addition of tasks in the mobile platform, but that’s coming along, albeit slowly.
So today I have those two e-mails that are languishing in my inbox because I haven’t gotten myself 100% into ToodleDo enough that I don’t fear that I’ll forget to address the tasks that need to be done. I know that I need to make that commitment, but I’m not quite there yet. Honestly, I’m thinking about starting another series on my journey with ToodleDo. But for today, I’m sticking to Inbox Zero.
The other issue that I’ve run into with Inbox Zero is that I’m not really all that great about processing the e-mails that I’ve deferred into subfolders underneath my @@Review structure. I know that I need to actually read those e-mails and do something about them, even is that “something” is putting them in the trash. I simply don’t take the necessary time to do that review. I setup reminders in my Google Calendar to tell me to pick an @@Review category and process it, but I find myself either snoozing or deleting that reminder without taking action. It’s a habit that I have to break.
In the back of my mind, I have this looming suspicion that I’m going to have to attack the @@Review and @Archive files in a manner similar to my initial journey to Inbox Zero. Frankly, I don’t even know how many e-mails are in the entire @@Review structure. I know there are 103 in the top level folder (@@Review is the top level, then there are folders beneath that). In @@Review-Ads there are 791 e-mails. Many of those date back quite a while, so it’s time to clear them out. The same goes for the 127 e-mails in the @@Review-Affiliates folder. Some will need to be trashed, some archived after reading, and some will take further actions.
As I’ve been writing this, I realize that I have this fear that I’m going to be overwhelmed by having to process thousands upon thousands of e-mails. But I’m going to admit this publicly, that’s stupid. I was able to process through 14,000+ e-mails in a couple of days just two months ago. While the processing wasn’t all that thought-intensive, I proved that I could do it. This batch of e-mails are broken down into categories, and the e-mails in each category are similar. I guess it’s time to put my Energizer Bunny suit back on and get to it.
So dear reader, I’m again using you as an accountability partner. Today I’m throwing it out there that I’m going to process through some (OK, I’ll say four) of my @@Review categories by the end of the day and fully process all the e-mails contained therein. I’m also going to add any tasks that need to be accomplished related to those e-mails into ToddleDo for tracking and as a method for keeping anything from falling through the cracks.
As a teaser of an upcoming post, I’m going to let you in on my secret next-phase weapon: Boomerang for Gmail. I haven’t used it enough yet to be able to tell you anything, but from the description Erik Fisher gave in his Podcast Beyond The Todo List, I’m pretty excited about this next tool to help with my e-mail saga.
So the bottom line is that I’m still managing to keep my inbox at zero e-mails (or nearly zero e-mails, but close enough for me at this point). I’m also pretty happy with my progress, although I want to go further and not just keep the inbox at zero, but also have less fall into the @@Review categories, or least have them languish there for much shorter periods of time. To accomplish that, I’m going to have to adjust my workflow a bit more and get even more focused on back-end processing of e-mail in those snippets of time that are available to me.
So the journey continues…
