It’s been a week. I’m sitting in a hotel in Broomfield, CO after attending the University of Colorado – Boulder graduation ceremonies. I’ve been on the Inbox Zero plan for a week now, and honestly, I’m feeling more in control than I have in years. It helps that I don’t have my cluttered office around me. It also helps that I don’t have a cluttered e-mail inbox. In fact, I just spent five minutes and processed through the 45 e-mails that arrived since 11:00 this morning. I started my day at 6:20 waiting in my car for my daughter to get out of her apartment (she overslept a little bit) and I spent five of those minutes processing the e-mail that arrived overnight. Just prior to the procession of the graduates I spent less than five minutes processing the e-mails that arrived between 6:20 and 8:30.<\/p>\n
So I’ve spent 15 minutes (actually probably a little less, but I rounded up each session) processing all the e-mail that arrived in my inbox during a “normal” working day. 15 minutes. And I processed through almost 80 e-mails.<\/p>\n
Note that I’ve used the verb\u00a0processed<\/em> when I describe what I’m doing with my e-mails. Processing means that I review each e-mail very quickly. Some are easy to determine what to do with them…they get trashed. Because I’m trying to keep things under control in the long run, before trashing an e-mail, I determine whether I want to receive e-mails from this sender in the future. If I do, then I’m creating a filter and rule to auto-file them for controlled review later. If I don’t want to receive this sort of e-mail in the future, I’m unsubscribing immediately. Right then, no deferred action like I was doing before. I actually act on those e-mails on the spot. I’m also sticking to my new habit of putting all the other e-mail either into the Archives for later referencing or into the Review folders for review.<\/p>\n So in addition to the 15 minutes that I spent processing the new incoming e-mails I also spent 30 minutes reviewing e-mails that I deferred earlier. Today I went through the @@Review\/Ads category. I went to the oldest e-mails that had been put into this folder. Some of them were as old as October of last year! I verified the e-mails, one screen-full at a time, making sure that they were just ads, and nothing else. There were a few that needed to be saved for archival purposes, so I refiled those. The remainder were deleted. In 30 minutes I removed 457 e-mails from my backlog. While it’s just a drop in the bucket, I’m kind of on a roll, so I’m going to keep working through the backlog while keeping up with the new incoming e-mails.<\/p>\n Like I said, it’s really an empowered feeling to be making progress on my e-mail inbox. In fact, it’s making enough of an impact that I’m seriously creating a strategy to do the same thing for my physical office. That’s going to be even more of a task…because that mess is physically in my space every day with no ability to just “turn off my office” and not see it.<\/p>\n But for today, and for the past week, I’m reveling in the fact that I’ve gotten my inbox and backlogged e-mail back in control<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a week. I’m sitting in a hotel in Broomfield, CO after attending the University of Colorado – Boulder graduation ceremonies. I’ve been on the Inbox Zero plan for a week now, and honestly, I’m feeling more in control than I have in years. It helps that I don’t have my cluttered office around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[16,45,66,81],"class_list":["post-936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity","tag-business","tag-inbox-zero","tag-organizing","tag-time-management"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n