Author: simon
Tame Your Inbox: New Year Resolution Idea
Tuesday, 6th January, 2009 at 10:55 am, Isle of Wight
Have you got a list of New Year resolutions as long as your arm, or are still deciding whether to add ’stop procrastinating’ to your currently blank sheet of paper?
Either way, here’s an idea for you.
We all know that email can be a right pain and it’s easy to find yourself dancing to the tune that your inbox sets, rather than you being the master of it.
This NY resolution should bring a bit of joy into your life, as well as give you an achievable goal.
Resolve to tame your email
To tame your email.
Bill Thompson and Suw Charman-Anderson have created a pledge to keep a tidy inbox – “I will ensure that my inbox is empty before I go to bed each day in 2009.”
Initially sounds really easy, but if you’re like me and operate a permanently chocker inbox, it’s not.
It’s not that I get sooo much email, it’s just that I’d let it defeat me. I’d given up on taming my inbox.
River of emails
I found myself treating my email more as a river – picking interesting nuggets out of it as it flowed through my inbox.
Realising things needed to change, I bit the bullet and signed the pledge today, just after moving my ridiculously bloated inbox – two thirds of it unread – to archive.
It’s a strange feeling to go from an inbox that is always full to one that is fully empty – quite unsettling actually.
The first few emails that arrived felt like an affront – how dare they soil the clean inbox!
Takes some effort
As the day has gone on I’ve found it hard to break the long-formed habit of cherry-picking emails. The correct approach of course is to just ‘touch’ each email only once – read it, deal with it, remove it. It’s going to take a little time to learn.
It’s clearly not as easy as just emptying your inbox – damn!
I’m going to stick with it, so why not sign the pledge and join up too?
Together we can tame email!
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Love it … cheers for the push into doing this.
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Coincidentally, I’ve just published a post about just this issue on my new Business Coaching blog at http://symmetrycoaching.co.uk/articles/tips-for-working-life/control-your-inbox/
In these demanding times, we need to find a better way to do things!
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@Madeline – great to see services like Business Coaching on the Island.
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I blitzed my email inbox before Christmas – created new mailboxes so it was all organised. But it’s already piling up (dating back to Dec 27)… I pledge to keep it tidy from now on!
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Sign up … it’s one other reason to keep to it.
I’m battling with my currently. I’ll admit, I’m finding it hard, but it is satisfying to see it empty at the end of the day.
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Oh blimey, can’t I just pledge it here, keep it local?! Mind you, I’m a lightweight really, I can’t compete with your prior weighty inbox of 35,000 emails (yes, I did look at the site). I notice there’s another pledge on there to “Publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire” – maybe that’s a chance to sing Sal’s praises!
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Hurrah – InBox empty. I’m closing down quickly before another email pops up!
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