The Boss of You

Through the Writer’s Revealed live chat this weekend (and by the way, it sadly looks like my “pearls of wisdom” have been lost to the internets) I had the chance to come across Lorissa’s blog, Lorissa is a boss lady in her own right, and has some great thoughts on work scattered throughout her site.

She brought up the Getting Things Done book during our chat on Sunday and has some thoughts on it on her site as well. Now the GTD approach to productivity isn’t new to me, but what caught my eye in particular this time around was the idea of the empty (or nearly empty) inbox. My inbox — particularly my email inbox — is an overloaded nightmare. Truly. And the idea of living with a clean inbox is something close to nirvana to me, (read: appealing but nearly unattainable). I read through the Zen Habits article on clearing out your inbox (which Lorissa had linked to) and realized that my big stumbling block for a clean inbox is some kind of mental block that causes me to assume that once I’ve filed something it’s not retrievable. Now I’m not down with the concept of only having one folder for Archives. I manage dozens of projects and ongoing clients and at this point nearly 8 years of email archives. I need more of a sorting system than that (typically I have one folder for each client etc) but for some strange reason my illogical subconcious (who seems to rule on this one) assumes that once something has left my inbox it’s no longer available to me. Which is of course, total bunk. My inbox isn’t full of unanswered email. I answer email, I follow up, I move items to my task list etc. Most everything else that is recommended in the article, I just then leave things there out of some reluctance (attachment? fear?) that I can’t really explain. What does this mean? For me it means an inbox with anywhere from 150 to 300 emails in it. For real. All read, all followed up on. But just sitting there waiting to be filed.

While going through that backlog will take time I certainly don’t have until later this month after we meet our book deadline, I have started dealing more efficiently with new mail that comes in. Taking note of my bad/weird habit as it’s happening and trying to break it.

What are your tricks tips for dealing with things like email? Any bad habits you care to divulge?