How often do you put off doing a little job that would really just take a couple of seconds only to have all those little jobs mushroom into a huge job? I have spent a few hours the past few days organizing my email in-box. I had a year's worth of messages that needed to be filed or deleted. While I am pretty good at immediately deleting messages that I read and don't need to take any action on, the ones that do need me to respond to or do some work on generally sit in my email in-box for an indeterminate amount of time, even after the related tasks have been completed.
So, I set up folders for all the different areas of my life and got to work filing those messages that I still needed to keep and deleting those whose usefulness was done. I was able to free up a great deal of storage space in my email box and everything looks so neat and organized now. Of course, as with any cleaning project, the goal is to have it stay that way. A few seconds of in-box maintenance on a daily basis will keep this from being a huge job in the future. I am going to make a definite effort to file or delete all messages as soon as my need for them is done.
Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur
