Spring is on its way, or at least I am desperately wishing for it to arrive. The weather in NY has been slightly warmer but we still have plenty of snow and ice in the mornings. I have resorted to pulling out my favorite springtime candles and just the other day I even opened the windows - it reached a blazing 40F degrees!
Naturally, with spring comes the need to organize, sort and clean. A few weeks ago the I.T. department was switching email servers at work and I went a few days without access to my account. When I regained access I had hundreds of emails to sort.
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| My work email is nothing compared to my Gmail account! |
To make matters worse all my old emails were marked unread. I confess: I have well over 2000 emails in that inbox. My Gmail account is even more frightening. All these new numbers pushed me to the edge (the email edge?) I decided to regain control of the inboxes, a perfect time to start spring cleaning a little early.
In Outlook I set up some folders and have rules so that emails from various lists will go right into that folder. There are also retention rules I have never actually used. I think they will be ideal for listserv emails (ex. delete emails from "History Is Fab List" after 3 weeks). From here I am just deleting messages from certain senders and the inbox is slowly shrinking. It is a small step forward but feels like a big difference.
While I was fiddling around I clicked something called 'clear offline items.' (Sounds helpful right?) It caused all my emails to disappear, yes you read that right. All the emails! For about ten minutes I was panicking because I had zero items in my inbox! I even considered how I would tell I.T. in hopes they could do an inbox restore. Then I hit some sort of zen-like moment, and thought to myself, "yes, this is the answer, this is the way forward. Zero emails." After coming to terms with what I had done, the emails slowly started loading (figures) until they were all back. Ha! I have no idea what clear offline items does except cause panic attacks.
Gmail tabs pre-filter many emails into the Social tab and the Promotion tab. Most of these are pretty much junk mail. It makes things less painful to 'click all' delete, but it also allows things to build up with out being super visible. I also use filters and labels, but when you have so many emails they don't really help.
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| This is a Trello board! Image from Say Yes To Less Stress |
Abby (@ArchivistAbby) recently introduced me to Trello. This was the fun and easy part of my digital spring cleaning. I started making boards, thinking of things to do, adding little due dates to things... and of course color coding things mostly for fun. My first order of business was to add a card to my board about organizing my inbox. I added a checklist on the card for things like 'set up rules, unsubscribe from promotional emails etc..' I can check off each inbox as I complete it. That is a project for a rainy day, (or maybe the next snow day) but I am looking forward it.
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I have so many projects happening this spring. To have everything laid out visually on this dashboard is really helpful. I can picture my spring semester at a glance. This is a screen shot of my Gossip Guide board as I was building it up. It will be great to quickly add post ideas and keep things on schedule! I can also invite guest authors to the board if needed.
We also created a shared board for an upcoming conference. It has been great to lay out all our items in the to-do pile and add in due dates. We can add files and links to different cards - very handy!
Now that my digital life is on its way to being in order I am ready to move on to life at home. That will be part two, coming soon.
How do you manage things like your inbox? I would love to read any tips or tricks you have to share!
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