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 previously 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!