So I’m a big big talker about GTD and Inbox Zero and all the clever modern knowledge productivity hoo-hah. But, I have to confess, my gmail inbox, which is where my personal mail goes, has had hundreds of messages in it for years. At one point I did manage to set up some really aggressive filtering (that needs to be constantly curated and maintained) to help slow the growth, but still. What a disgrace. The oldest message in it right is from 2007. I’d asked a friend for a pointer to some slow cooker recipes. And there it sits.
Now, part of the problem is that I’ve given myself a classic yak-shaving problem. I can’t deal with that slow cooker recipes email until I figure out how I’m going to store and manage all of my recipes. And I can’t do that until I figure out what to do with all of my cookbooks. And all of the loose piles of paper recipes sitting in the bottom cupboard of the sideboard. I might scan them into Evernote. But we don’t have a scanner hooked up right now. And I can’t get the scanner hooked up until we transition the old fax machine into the new 3-in-1 copier/scanner/fax that’s been sitting in its box for .. umm… many many moons! You get the picture.
But I do have a moderately-functioning Omnifocus (with its own dozens and dozens of projects) that I could translate some of these emails into. So, at the beginning of the year I decided I was going to find a way to deal with this massive junky inbox. I set before myself a low-key task: remove, archive, delete, or otherwise deal with just 10 messages per day. A net 10 messages that is. I could leave something that had arrived that day, but that would mean removing 11 of the old ones. So far, it’s been working. I suspect it will get harder as I get closer to zero, so I may have to change my rule to 5 per day. But everytime I declared that a certain day would be the day I cleaned out the gmail box, I’d get distracted or pulled away for something, and the next thing I knew it would have 100 more messages in it. So, slow and steady is the mantra now. There are about 250 messages left, so in theory, a month from now, I should have my personal email inbox under control.
We shall see.
I’m in about the same place as you — not as much mail piled up, but tons of other things and in-process projects that are blocked on other things that are blocked on having a wife and two kids and a fairly interesting engaging job and the occasional desire to just sit on the couch like a lump for a while. Sometimes, though, I also get a wild hair up to do something — and the important thing is to just roll with that, and not impede the impulse by over-thinking it — just jump in, find an open loop or three, and CRUSH THEM.
(This is more to help me remember this than because I think you don’t already know it… 8^) )
There’s something charming about looking at or cooking from paper recipes, whether old handwritten or typewritered ones or those simply torn from the newspaper or NYT Sunday Mag. Even GTD would allow you to put them in manila folders rather than scan them. You can do this in an hour or so. First get say 20 sheets of paper and write categories in big letters along the bottom: Appetizers, Desserts, Salad, Soup, Thanksgiving, whatever. Lay out the sheets of paper in alphabetical order on the kitchen counter or table or both. Grab a handful of the recipes and start sorting by placing them on top of the appropriate sheet of paper. If you can’t finish in the time you have then just stack the papers and recipes together. Once you are done sorting replace the sheets of paper with appropriately-labeled manila folders. You can label them all something like Recipes: Appetizers so they are all filed together.