A year ago, I wrote a little script that runs a couple of times per day and records the number of emails in my inbox into a database. I did this because I noticed that this number is a fairly reliable indicator of how good I feel in general. When I feel great, the number of emails in my inbox goes down. When I feel bad, it goes up.
The script produces a tiny chart showing how I did the last few days (live view). Looking at the chart going down gives me a nice little psychological kick – the same kind of small satisfaction you get from ticking off an item from a to-do list.
Email overload is a constant issue for me. There’s so much stuff coming in every day, with lots of noise but also lots of interesting and important messages that need to be dealt with. Sometimes it’s okay, but especially when I’m stressed out I find it almost impossible to keep up with the deluge. Making a decision on what to do about a particular mail is often hard, and I have a tendency to put off the hardest ones, especially when I’m under pressure from other matters. Sometimes it gets so bad I even stop weeding out the spam, and there are days where I dread even looking at the inbox.
In theory, I know how to solve this. It’s common sense really, and has been told and written down countless times. Keep your inbox at zero messages – it’s an inbox, not an archive or to-do list. Figure out what to do with each message right when it comes into your life. Make a decision, don’t let it sit. Is it junk? Delete. Is it something that just needs a quick two-sentence response? Respond and archive the mail. Does it announce some kind of event? Decide if I’m interested and put it on the calendar. A long and potentially interesting mailing list message? Put it in the to-read folder. Does it require a longer response or does it imply some action item for me? Put it in the to-do folder and work on it over the day. After a few minutes, the inbox should be empty again, and I should have a clear and clean picture of my new commitments.
I know all this, and have been trying literally for years to get there, whittling away at all the stuff that has collected in the inbox, sometimes getting down to 50 or even 20 mails, but always being buried again when the next deadline or stressful week comes up. It’s been only a few days since I managed to hit zero. And indeed, starting the day with an empty plate is a nice motivation to get there again at the end of the day.
So anyway, the script has run for a full year now and now I made a chart that shows the numbers for the whole time. I feel good about this, because it indicates that I’m about to get one more area of my life under control.
(The huge spike is when this blog was hit by a massive comment spam attack that generated hundreds of moderation requests. Luckily Akismet has mostly eliminated this kind of problem.)
What’s your email story?