third time’s a charm (I hope)

I’ve once again begun moseying through Leo Babauta’s book, The Power of Less. Hopefully, third time’s a charm. Have my own copy this time. During the weeks following the return to the library of the copy I’d borrowed, memory began to fade, though not so much as to alleviate the awareness that I really needed to keep going with it, follow his plan for zeroing in on the essential, make those subtle to major changes in my habits/schedule.

Chapter two is titled, “The Art of Setting Limits.” Under the heading of “What to set limits on,” he asks, “What would you like to simplify?” And, he gives a list of some good places to start. The first one on the list is: Email.

I’ve been thinking about the chapter where he addresses email specifically, using the phrase, “Process to empty.” Deal with each day’s email each day. File what needs to be kept, clear the rest.

Hmmm.

I checked my inbox.

Houston, we’ve had a problem.

If you click on the image, you can see it bigger — though I’m not exactly sure why I’m telling you that :o)

20,676 message?!! 517 pages?!! Yikes! I have emails in there dating from 2007 — the earliest one, an “incident ticket” for our GoDaddy hosting account. Cheeze.

So, over the next few days (weeks?), I’ll be following his first suggestion for dealing with this kind of situation. He recommends, “If you have a very full in-box (hundreds or thousands of messages), you should create a temporary folder (“to be filed”) and get to them later, processing them perhaps thirty minutes at a time until they’ve all been taken care of.”

Hundreds or thousands of messages . . . ahhh, I’m not alone. Kind of an odd sense of comfort, but I’m grateful for it, just the same.

Alrighty then, I’m off to cosmetically clear my inbox . . .