With tremendous focus and self-organization, I have finally managed to whittle down the contents of my e-mail In Box from 177 messages to 35. I keep a pretty tight in-box, and there’s a lot of stuff I don’t keep — probably I throw away more than I should.

All the same, I do try to keep e-mail only related to what’s actually on my to-do list in my in box, under the suspicion that anything which stays there more than a few weeks or months functions just like clutter in the house — disturbing the mind and disturbing the soul, even if it’s only “just a few things out of the way.”

Yet it could be that I’m wrong. Do others of you have different perspectives? How do you keep and sort e-mail so that it makes some sort of sense?

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