The Bottom of the Inbox

I am proud of myself. Rather than add one more half-simmered thought piece to the conversations about the elections, I completed one of my planned tasks for the week: clearing my inbox. While maybe not the most exciting story for sharing, I saw the bottom of my inbox — and it was beautiful. No, not an email inbox, my actual inbox . . . People still have those, right?

Why so much in the pile, you judge? Well, every few weeks, my to-do list reminds me to spend 1 Pomodoro going through my inbox, and like most folks, I forward that task from week to week until my box reaches overflowing.

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But with some new projects launching in the fall and some time to get to it, I dug in. A couple of hours later, the bottom of the tray saw daylight.

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For those of you who are super disciplined about filing, yes, I COULD file and organize items as they come, but what fun would that be? Plus, as we all know, if you leave something in your inbox for long enough, you realize how important it is, and it doesn’t matter that you never made room for it, “Oops, never go to that, and now it’s too late.” Fortunately, most things I tossed in here were truly, “to tackle later” items, so it was not too painful. That said, there were a couple of “Oh, that’s where that was.” moments, and those were equally beautiful.

To be clear, I did not accomplish all the tasks from the stack, but I rebooted my Getting Things Done and ToDoist organizational life, one of the only organization systems that has ever worked consistently for me. If any of you follow GTD, consider my inbox brain dumped.

One of the mountains that I will overcome as I enter into a season of full-time writing is the need to be better disciplined in my administrative life. I may be hiring someone to help, but being patient and clearing the backlog of “Sure, I can do that” tasks improves the odds of success and frees me up to spend more energy on what is next.

There are a few more piles of household chaos to organize, and then it’s on to the fun stuff like migrating to a new email/sms communication platform, updating the website, and developing a new writing and speaking calendar. I know these are coveted activities, but back off, these are mine :-)

Before launching in the fall, there is still much to do, but at least my inbox will be empty for a day or two.