Inbox Zero, Day #6

My e-mail in-boxes still have zero items in them. Inbox Zero is hard. Very hard. It's teaching me a lot about myself.

On Day #3, I found myself scanning the Bulk mail folder and checking my Spam Quarantine. More than once a day. What was this all about?

Merlin Mann talks about the early days of email - the good feeling of hearing from one of your 3 friends who were online. The sense of being connected. Now everyone is online, most of our mail is spam - but we still get that warm feeling when we hear from a friend.

When I looked at my mailbox full of 600+ messages, somewhere in there were messages from my father, from old friends I hadn't seen for ages, encouraging messages from colleagues. Not that I looked at them. But it gave a sense of connection and belonging.

Do I keep every letter I receive on my desk? Of course not! Some I toss without opening. Some have to be dealt with, or passed along. A few are keepers - important information or the Wild Woman birthday card. Even those don't sit around cluttering up the room. I'll get over that empty feeling of Inbox Zero.

The other temptation is to use the Inbox as a reminder. A student sends the draft of a paper I need to review. "If I leave here in the inbox," I think, "I'll remember to do it first thing." I know from experience this doesn't always work. What if I leave five items in the inbox as reminders, and 8 more messages come during the night? I'll lose track of something. So the student's paper is duly noted on my To Do list in my calendar, the message moved to the folder.

And the Inbox count is Zero again.