It’s been a week. I’m sitting in a hotel in Broomfield, CO after attending the University of Colorado – Boulder graduation ceremonies. I’ve been on the Inbox Zero plan for a week now, and honestly, I’m feeling more in control than I have in years. It helps that I don’t have my cluttered office around me. It also helps that I don’t have a cluttered e-mail inbox. In fact, I just spent five minutes and processed through the 45 e-mails that arrived since 11:00 this morning. I started my day at 6:20 waiting in my car for my daughter to get out of her apartment (she overslept a little bit) and I spent five of those minutes processing the e-mail that arrived overnight. Just prior to the procession of the graduates I spent less than five minutes processing the e-mails that arrived between 6:20 and 8:30.

So I’ve spent 15 minutes (actually probably a little less, but I rounded up each session) processing all the e-mail that arrived in my inbox during a “normal” working day. 15 minutes. And I processed through almost 80 e-mails.

Note that I’ve used the verb processed when I describe what I’m doing with my e-mails. Processing means that I review each e-mail very quickly. Some are easy to determine what to do with them…they get trashed. Because I’m trying to keep things under control in the long run, before trashing an e-mail, I determine whether I want to receive e-mails from this sender in the future. If I do, then I’m creating a filter and rule to auto-file them for controlled review later. If I don’t want to receive this sort of e-mail in the future, I’m unsubscribing immediately. Right then, no deferred action like I was doing before. I actually act on those e-mails on the spot. I’m also sticking to my new habit of putting all the other e-mail either into the Archives for later referencing or into the Review folders for review.

So in addition to the 15 minutes that I spent processing the new incoming e-mails I also spent 30 minutes reviewing e-mails that I deferred earlier. Today I went through the @@Review/Ads category. I went to the oldest e-mails that had been put into this folder. Some of them were as old as October of last year! I verified the e-mails, one screen-full at a time, making sure that they were just ads, and nothing else. There were a few that needed to be saved for archival purposes, so I refiled those. The remainder were deleted. In 30 minutes I removed 457 e-mails from my backlog. While it’s just a drop in the bucket, I’m kind of on a roll, so I’m going to keep working through the backlog while keeping up with the new incoming e-mails.

Like I said, it’s really an empowered feeling to be making progress on my e-mail inbox. In fact, it’s making enough of an impact that I’m seriously creating a strategy to do the same thing for my physical office. That’s going to be even more of a task…because that mess is physically in my space every day with no ability to just “turn off my office” and not see it.

But for today, and for the past week, I’m reveling in the fact that I’ve gotten my inbox and backlogged e-mail back in control