Cleaning Out My Inboxes Today

Now how’s that for an exciting title? ☺

I try and block out time each morning to write for this blog. If there are 10-15 minutes left at the end of the block, that time usually goes toward trying to clean out a couple of my email inboxes. These aren’t my primary Inboxes, these are the Inboxes I use for managing the administrative side of my company and also for personal items.

I also use these inboxes as my to-do lists, as I learned from Ari Meisel’s Less Doing class. The goal is to keep them to fewer than 10 messages at any time. The reality is they usually creep up to about 30-40 messages, since I don’t clean them out each day. I scan these inboxes each day and choose the top 2-3 items to get done, put those items on a “post-it” note on my Macbooks’ dashboard, and use that list to help me maintain focus throughout the day.

Today I’m feeling the need to spend more time cleaning-up the Inboxes than usual and will be sacrificing some writing time as a result. I think, or at least hope, that doing this will provide me with a sense of order, that seems to be helpful in re-establishing a foundation to work from, as I’m at the mid-way point of a pretty intimidating week. So, that’s what I’m off to now and see you tomorrow…