Clearing Out Crap

I just watched a really interesting video of one of Merlin Mann's talks at a Google conference in July 2007. The gist of this talk is uncluttering one's e-mail inbox to bring about a sound process to their life. For google employees, their inbox can look like a battleground. Emails reside in this jungle vying for the top position in the owner's priority list.

Merlin's idea is the Zero Inbox. What this means is that a person's inbox should have literally zero emails just wasting away in this electronic prison. I have seen people with inboxes that contain fifty to a hundred emails and I wonder how they can even keep track of all that stuff. I don't claim to be very good at all when it comes to organization, but I actually keep a system that works remarkably well for me.

When I receive an email, I always ask myself what this email means to me. If the contents of that email are fairly important, I will put it into one of several areas. I have 2 areas where I keep important dates and documents. My source for holding deadlines and meetings is actually a blog just like this one. I don't operate it like a normal blog because that would be detrimental to me staying organized. It was a bit of a process, but through experimentation I worked it out. When I first started it, I would put in an entry every single day; however, the entries would become too numerous and I found myself sifting through lines and lines of stuff that didn't indicate whether the tasks were done or not. I reduced the blog to one single post. I update this post whenever a new task comes about. I color code the tasks in a way that makes sense to me. Tasks that need to be done are in a black font, completed tasks are red, meetings are blue and ongoing tasks are coded green.

Next, for documents I keep a very rudementary system within my computer. I keep documents in a document stack that contains several folders. Each folder has a subject and documents go to their respective subject folder. For example, I have a classes folder within the stack, within that folder I have my current semester folder. Within that folder I have folders that go along with my classes that I am taking. My other folder contains all my old classes and every document I have collected during my college career.

This system is far from perfect and I am constantly trying to figure out ways to make it better. I guess that's the fun thing about life, you always find ways to make things better.