Getting to Zero

I think I might make it. I've been in serious inbox denial for several days now, but today I got my head above water, did a big purge, and really, I think I might get to zero before I go on vacation. They say not to use your inbox as a to do list, so email generally collects in a folder called "to do" if there's something I can't get to that day or just don't want to forget. Since school ended I have been a real bad email manager and, well, my box was a little overgrown. It got the weed whacker treatment today though, and at the end of the day we had zero in each inbox and 31 in the "to do" box.

This is only possible because with the exception of a virtual blizzard of amazon.com shipping confirmations the email has really slowed down to a crawl over the last couple of days.

I swear, you order seven or eight items from that company, four or five of which turn out to be from third party vendors and all of a sudden you get six different shipments, each with its very own three or four emails. After you check out it shoud say "Do you want spam with that? Spam, spam, spam, spam, LOVELY SPAM! Wonderful spam..."

But I digress.

Each of the last three days I'd been able to knock of that days messages in a matter of minutes. On each occasion bringing me back to that stubborn group of emails I had been studiously ignoring - some for months. The oldest email of the group is an address update for my family address webpage from back in January. To me that feels old, but I get the feeling that there are many people out there with positively petrified email messages.

I cheated a little bit to clear the inboxes. I've never been a fan of Outlook's flagging feature, but today, the stuff that had been low priority inbox messages got flagged and then put in the To Do folder. That way I can have a nice clean, bare box and still not delete through email bankruptcy.

Of course, it doesn't look like the flags mapped from one computer to the other. Foiled again!

So, if things stay at the pace they're at, if I stay focussed, and if I don't order anything else from Amazon, is there really anything that could stop me from getting to zero in say a week? That would be SO COOL.

I don't know what I would do with no email. Let's find out.