I took some of the things in Randy Pausch's Time Management lecture (see related post) to heart and I'm trying to do at least a couple of his suggestions. One of the things that I am trying this week is keeping my email inbox empty. I've always had sub-folders where I let Outlook autosort email from big distribution lists, but I've let my inbox be my catch-all for everything else. I started this week by moving the ~6500 items from my inbox into a sub-folder and have since been attempting, successfully so far, to keep my inbox at "0 items".

I have to admit that it feels a bit strange. I switch to Outlook and there's an empty inbox. I can't pretend like I'm working as I scroll through the list. Everything that has come in has either been handled, deleted, or filed into a sub-folder. I know immediately how may "email-action-items" I have (3 currently) that require me to do something and respond. When I left work yesterday I didn't feel like I needed to go through my email "one last time" before leaving...it was empty, nothing to go through and I knew the one action item I had was waiting on a response.

Getting to work this morning I had 42 (meaning of life, the universe, and everything) messages waiting for me. Even spending the time to explore the links that interested me from the trade-emails that I get, I was back down to an empty inbox in about twenty minutes. Throughout the day, I don't feel like I need to check every email as it comes in, when I choose to look at my inbox the number of items is small and I can take care of them on my schedule. Before the clean inbox, I found myself looking as each email came in, there was so much in the inbox that if I didn't keep watch, I might miss something that actually needed my attention (and of course, this method meant that I would miss things that came in when I wasn't sitting at my computer).

My perspective on email as a tool rather than a job is already changing. As my colleague Josh said, "It takes two weeks to establish a habit"...I'm looking forward to hitting the two week mark with my inbox still empty.