January 12, 2006
New Years Resolutions and a Clean Inbox
One of my worst habits is to procrastinate with personal email replies. I have no problem using email for business but this communication channel has been broken in my personal life for a while. So bad is this habit that I can go months before I give up—in disgust and disgrace—by finally filing away the original I never responded to so it's not cluttering up my inbox anymore.
Then I read Merlin's article Fresh Start: The Email DMZ and decided that I would reply to all the emails I hadn't given up on yet and resolved to try to keep my inbox clean from now on.
Now I just treat my personal email like my work email. I move those messages to which I've already replied, or those which need no reply, out of the inbox. That way the inbox is a list of tasks which need an action. The different is where in my business inbox I don't necessarily reply until I have an answer or I'm ready to present a new phase of the project, in my personal inbox the reply is most often the task itself.
This may seem like a small change psychologically, but its working for me so far. I realized that a short almost business-like reply to a friend is better than no reply at all. Now my inbox is clean and I'm able to manage it better.