So, I'm not precisely making New Year's Resolutions, but there are a couple of things I've been wanting to work on, and I'm using a bit of my holiday time off to try to get a few of these things jump started.

One of these is getting better at the way I deal with personal e-mail.

I can remember a time when I was a good e-mail correspondent. It wasn't that long ago. However, the volume of e-mail that I get has gone up a lot. Spam is a problem, but the bigger problem is stuff that isn't really spam, but is kind of in a grey-area: it's e-mail that I generally want to recieve, and that I'm interested in the contents of at least to some extent, but that isn't high priority or demanding of an immediate response. I'm talking about messages from mailing lists I've subscribed to, receipts for stuff I've purchased on-line, e-mail alerts from political groups on stuff that I might want to send a stern letter to my Congresscritter about.

This kind of stuff is starting to choke up my Inbox. Lately I've been running with 400+ messages in my e-mail inbox, and an average of about 50 unread messages at a time. All of this junk tends to crowd out messages from family and friends that I genuinely want to reply to, and so I often find myself smacking my forehead and realizing that I have month-old messages sitting around unanswered, and all my loved ones must think that I am a Giant Flake. And so, looking at my personal e-mail engenders vast sensations of guilt, which isn't very conducive to my dealing productively with my e-mail. (I know it's a silly thing to get all angsty about, but there are few worse sins in my universe than being a Giant Flake. Or at least few worse sins that I personally am prone to.)

However, I recently discovered a simple and elegant principle for dealing with my work e-mail that has really made a tremendous difference in how I deal with my work e-mail. It's absurdly simple: strive continually for a completely empty Inbox.

In more detail, for each new piece of e-mail that comes in:
1. If the e-mail requires a reply, either reply immediately, or leave the e-mail in the Inbox. Once the e-mail has been replied to, either delete it, or move it to an appropriate folder if it happens to contain information that might be of use later.
2. If the e-mail requires me to take an action, add the action to my calendar or to-do list. Then delete the e-mail or move it to a folder.
3. If the e-mail contains information that will be useful for future reference, file the e-mail in an appropriate folder.
4. If the information in the e-mail is not going to be useful for future reference, delete it immediately.

It really doesn't seem like it is that big a deal, but it means that any e-mail that is in my inbox is either a)brand new and unlooked at or b)something that I've looked at and decided I need to reply to. And once you've done the initial work of cleaning out the overflowing inbox, and setting up a good system of folders for filing stuff you want to keep, it's remarkably easy to maintain. I don't think I've ever had more than 15 messages in my work inbox at a time since I started implementing this system.

So, anyway, I'm going to try to do the same thing with my personal e-mail. I've weeded things down to 93 messages, created some new folders, and tweaked my rules for automatically filtering messages into folders. All I need to do now is finish the weeding.

Wish me luck!