EVER. Okay, so that’s a little harsh and not completely true. But here’s what I did. It being the New Year and all, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about making changes. Seemed like an appropriate time.  And in all this reading I came across some great stuff.  Notably, I discovered this blog and then through it, this blog — where I found a few excellent articles on processing your Email Inbox to ZERO and keeping it there:

http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/philosophy and  http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/14/delete

Although I had heard Tim Ferris talk to this point and I had implemented his email autoresponder rule to great success, I still had a ton of mail in my inbox. 362 unread messages: Facebook notifications, email requests from friends of friends, crap offers from Amazon.com. All just sitting there, staring at me. Taunting me.  And thousands of other checked emails that were in a kind of limbo. They don’t want to be deleted and they are too many to process. Years of bad email habits have added up.

I decided drastic, massive action was necessary. I gave myself a timeline of twenty minutes and sat down with a page of the 50 newest emails, asking myself three questions:

1.    What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
2.    What action, if any, does this message require of me?
3.    What’s the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?

(questions are from this post: http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/20/action)

If there was a response required I did it in one or two lines, sent it, and then archived it. If it wasn’t worth my time, it went straight to the archive, never again to enter the sanctity of my mental space.

The rest — MY ENTIRE EMAIL BOX — went directly to the bin. Do not pass go and collect $200. If it wasn’t important enough to answer by now, it didn’t deserve to be answered at all.

I spent another 20 minutes doing the same to my work email box. And it felt GOOD.

I’m now starting 2009 with a clean email box. Every new email will be processed as I receive it: action, reply or not worth my attention (delete). Might not sound like a big deal, but I feel like it’s had a great UNCLUTTERING effect on my MENTAL SPACE.

(Note: If I were really extreme I would have deleted everything. However. Gmail has the convenient archiving feature where it’s like the mail is gone, but if you ever need to search for the information in a mail – phone number, etc. – you can find it.)

So if you sent me a 5 paragraph email and I responded with one line, don’t take it personally. If you asked me about something trivial six months ago and I didn’t email back, it’s not because I don’t like you or value your friendship. I do. You see, we’re all in this situation where there is just too much email traffic out there. Too many people asking for our time and attention, when our priority should be to live in the now – the NON-DIGITAL NOW.

What the hell did people do before email? I’m about to find out.

Post Script: If anyone knows of a way to use an autoresponder with Facebook, I’d love to hear it. I don’t want to completely scrap the app, as it’s a great networker, but the amount of “Hey, what’ve you been up to these days?” messages are getting to me.