A Spoonful of Sugar

I hate my email inbox.  There is always too much email in it.  It is hard to weed out the junk, the useless and the out of date to get to emails that I might actually want.  I don't check it as often as I want because the prospect of over 1,000 emails is so overwhelming.  Periodically I take a half hour or more weeding out and deleting emails.  I always feel like I am trying to dig myself out of a hole but the dirt keeps just falling back in on top of me.  I have tried many ways to fix this, but to no avail.

But today I had a new idea and am excited to try it out to see if it works long term.  I was sitting in bed because my chronic pain had flared up and I needed to rest.  My ipod was on, with my "cleaning" playlist on because before I realized I needed to rest I had planned to clean my room.  Since that was out, I decided to check my email.

Now I need to add an aside here.  I just recently got a ipod and I do not really completely understand how to use it.  So I did not know how to turn the music off when I went to my email.  But that turned out to be a good thing.

Just I finished checking the email that came in that day, the playlist went to a song I had not heard in a while.  I wanted to listen to it, so I decided to go through my inbox for just the length of time the song was on and delete any obvious junk mail.  I focused on emails I did not even have to open to know I did not need them.  No thought was required.  Just a few minutes enjoying an old song.

Funny thing was, by the time the song ended, my inbox was decreased by over 30 emails and I had fun doing it. I guess a spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down.

So this will be my new daily email routine.  Hopefully the result will be a much smaller email inbox and time to listen to some good music that I never seem to have the time to enjoy.