Day 21 of the 30-Day Challenge: Procrastination Station
Task: To clean up my personal email inbox.
Reason for Task: My inbox is a hot mess! I mean I literally have hundreds of emails sitting in my inbox that need to be obliterated. Unfortunately, there are some tasks that I simply don’t keep up with, and maintaining a tidy inbox falls in that category. For years, I’ve managed to survive with a cluttered inbox; but there’s no reason that it should be in the state it’s in. All it would take for me to get my personal emails in tip-top shape is to exercise a little discipline and take a few hours in one day to do a complete overhaul. I’m guessing that I might even be able to clean up the majority of my inbox pretty quickly, because I have a lot of unsolicited emails that just need deleting. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you’ve been able to forgo reading emails for years, then you probably don’t need to leave them hanging around… unless they house some important reference material or supporting documentation that you need to keep for evidential purposes. In that case, I would suggest saving several copies of these types of emails in different repositories for safe-keeping as well as creating different email folders to move them into so they’re not sitting unattended in the inbox.
Let’s pause a moment for some real talk. Sometimes, I’m pretty good about handing out advice and not adopting it myself… not intentionally though. I just find that I can occasionally overlook best practices when it comes to my own adoption of them. However, I realize this is an area that I need to work on. So, I plan on scouring my inbox, filing important emails in folders, and making sure save-worthy email documentation is stored in at least one other filing system to provide a back-up copy.
Duration of Task: 1 day; however, my intention is to keep my personal email inbox clean on a continual basis for life.
Outcome: What can I say? It was a tedious task that I just had to put my nose to the grindstone and do. I was able to delete the majority of the emails in my inbox and I also unsubscribed to some mailing lists in order to prevent further influx of emails that I simply don’t need anymore. I got a lot accomplished and I’m pleased with the result so far, but I still have a number of emails sitting in my inbox, waiting to be moved to folders. I’ll continue to work on them each day until I whittle my inbox down to the current day’s emails only. Quite frankly, this is the task that keeps on giving, however, I did manage to get my inbox down from 3,087 emails to 464 emails. Now, that’s progress; but, the challenge remains in the upkeep. If I can just wrap my brain around checking my personal emails daily like I do my business emails, I’ll be just fine. So, I’m working on programming this task into my daily routine so I can be successful with today’s challenge on an ongoing basis. I figure that 20 minutes a day (10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night) is ample time to work on personal daily emails. I’ll tweak my timing if need be.
A Little Tidbit: I didn’t address my business email inbox in this challenge, because it’s currently sitting in pretty good shape. It’s too clean; it needs a little more traffic, y’all. I absolutely love and totally welcome any busywork involving my Degrees of Maternity inbox. I know… I know… a shameless plug has entered the blogosphere. But seriously, it would be great to keep in touch with those of you who may only occasionally check out my blog. So, feel free to subscribe to Degrees of Maternity if you’re not already doing so and I’ll make sure that new content gets emailed to you as it comes hot off the online press. I want to make sure and keep you abreast of what’s going on with Degrees of Maternity. I have some really exciting projects that I’m rolling out next year and I would be honored if you would be a part of it. 2019, HERE WE COME!
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