Email Again
I've got 500 backlogged emails again. About 200 of them are the same backlogged emails I didn't get through the first time I tried to clean up but never did... which means some are literally 5 months old. The other 300 have arrived since then and need some amount of brain power to process and respond to (which of course innevitably generates responses, etc. Urgh). I'm thinking how wonderful it would be now that I've happened to wake up early and got through my morning news to just crank through those emails and have a clean inbox by lunch time. Wouldn't that be great? Start off the weekend with a clean slate. Oh, the joy.
I need to come up with some rules about what gets a response and what doesn't, and how much of a response is adequate and how much is too long. I obviously don't have a good system in place right now at all. There are other people who get a lot more email than I do and are somehow able to manage it all, but I just can't seem to end the day with less emails in my inbox than when I started.
I'd love to come up with hard rules to help crank through them all. I try to think of things like "only one sentence reponses" and "no skipping over messages" (i.e. make the decision to respond or not to respond once and for all) but it never seems to happen, I get sucked into a few emails and then that's the ballgame.
Or I end up writing in my blog about how much I can't seem to get through my email... and the urge passes.
-Russ