Something must be in the air. Like Dave, I’ve been making a concerted effort to clean out my email inbox over the past couple weeks.
All year, I’ve been fluctuating between 80 – 140 messages, not including the hundreds sitting in my ‘Respond to’ folder.
For the past week, I’ve been steadily at Inbox Zero.
With 17 2 in my ‘Respond to’ folder and the oldest message is from June ‘09 not Feb ‘09.
Here’s how I’ve tamed my inbox in 3 steps:
- Read each email message and determine a what the next action is.
This is the hardest step. - Write down the next action.
I have a ThingsToDo.txt file I use w/ Quicksilver’s Append Text to File action. - Ruthlessly file into a project folder or delete.
All of this is leading up to a couple ideas I want to implement for ongoing communications management – but it will only work once this backlog is cleaned out.
