Oh Emails… You Multiply like Rabbits!

I have written about my emails a few times before… Back in 2015, I had grand ambitions of a weekly decluttering goal and one of the weeks was my email inboxes.  I made progress, but didn’t get the job completely done…

It was about this time last year that I felt the need to revisit my email clutter… I did pretty well, emptying out 4 of my 5 email inboxes.  But… I have let it all slide…

At the end of the last round of email decluttering my inbox totals were looking like this:

December 1, 2016 Total: 6452 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 6452

And today, my total is looking a bit more like this:

Current Inbox Total: 7487 + 8 + 22 + 7 + 3 = 7527

So, that’s actually not that bad… But what that doesn’t show is the emails that I have “sorted” in to my GTD folders (as I explained in that last post – and for those that aren’t following what GTD is, it stands for “Getting Things Done” and is the acronym for a methodology from David Allen’s book of the same name.) and haven’t done anything about… That’s not really the point of those GTD folders… They are supposed to help you “Get Things Done”…

Anyway, since I’m waiting for renovations to be completed before I can do any more traditional decluttering, I figured I could spend some time sorting through these email inboxes and GTD folders, and either do stuff, or delete stuff…

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Follow-Up On My Email Decluttering

As a part of my 2015 decluttering goals, I scheduled week #3 to be decluttering my email inboxes.  I posted my results after my first round of decluttering, but I didn’t make huge progress, so I left is as a sort of “to be completed and maintained” type of task.  I have just recently totally changed up my email process, so I thought it was about time to do a quick follow up post.

My original total of emails was: 9300 + 1000 + 100 + 100 + 30 = 10530

After my first round of decluttering my total was: 6170 + 850 + 0 + 20 + 20 = 7060

And then Alicia from Financial Diffraction (who is no longer blogging it appears) introduced me to the Email Game.  It changed my email decluttering task from boring and monotonous, to a game to get points.  I like points.  🙂

It worked for a while, and I was slowly bringing down my total… but then I got lazy… and well… I stopped playing the game and stopped deleting emails and just started letting them add up again… Every so often I’d take some time to delete emails, but most of the time, I’d just let them accumulate…

But that has all changed now!  Last week, while I was finally attempting to finish reading the “Getting Things Done” book by David Allen, I decided to check the totals again to see where I stand, and start implementing the GTD process with my emails.  (Side note, I once again did not finish reading the book before I had to return it to the library…)

GTD at Work

When I started this blog, one of my first goals was to be more productive at work.  I didn’t really know how to go about doing that, so I put together a bit of a plan to achieve that goal, but it turns out that I wasn’t very good at following my plan… In the end, I gave myself a pass because the goal wasn’t super clear, and this year I didn’t even make any professional goals here on the blog.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reading the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen, and I promised that I would keep you appraised of my progress with the method of organizing and being productive… Well, I am still waiting to get the book back from the library, but have done quite a bit of online research and reading, and so have started implementing bits and pieces of it already.  (I’m sure I will change everything once I have actually read the whole book, but I figure starting something is better than procrastinating any further…)

Anyway, I’m still looking to increase my productivity at work, so I actually started implement the GTD process at work first, because I keep that separate from my personal stuff and it isn’t quite as overwhelming.  And if you read back to my plan for productivity that I made last January, it has some parallels to the GTD system, so I already was heading that direction before, I just didn’t quite make it all the way.  (GTD is the short form for “Getting Things Done”.)

I don’t really talk about the details of my work, only that I travel a lot.  I’m not going to change that; this blog is currently anonymous and I don’t want to accidentally say something about a project or a client that I shouldn’t.  So, no details for you, sorry, but I did want to share what I started for my GTD process, in case it might inspire someone, or maybe someone will have some pointers to share with me…

The Irony of Not Getting Things Done

One of my goals for 2016 was to read 12 books.  It has started me on a library kick (well, I guess I started the library kick last year when I got started on the KonMari method), and it has been really fun.  The online system that our local library has is awesome.  I can search books, put holds on them… it emails me when they are ready for pick up, and then I just head down on one of the evenings they are open late, or on the weekend to pick up my books.

However, the unfortunate part of all this is, I seem to keep picking books that are popular and so they have reservations, which means that I only have 1 or 2 weeks to read them, and since I only read very sporadically, I have yet to actually finish a book.  Yup, that’s right… We are six months in to 2016 (well, 7 tomorrow I guess) and I haven’t read a single book yet.  I have read lots of partial books… but have not made it to the end of any of the books.

One of the books that I just recently had to return when I wasn’t quite done is Getting Things Done by David Allen.  The irony of this is not lost on me.  I was laughing about this with a coworker one day at lunch when I was reading the book (a last ditch effort to get as much out of it as I could before I had to return it).  I guess I really need to apply the theories in the book, so I can at least finish the book…