The Twenty Minute Day

A never ending yet strangely satisfying task

I am one of those people who can have hundreds of unread emails flagged in my sidebar, and it doesn’t make me bat an eye. This is because I skim my emails and open what is important.

I work with someone who has trouble focusing if their inbox isn’t up to date, which has inspired me to determine if I would be more productive if my inbox was also cleared. Not just browsed but actually sitting with no new messages.

A large part of this project’s time will be managing the enormous amount of informational emails I seem to get. These aren’t the gross and disgusting types of spam; I know that the spam filter will look after those. These are the ones that, once upon a time, I signed up for a newsletter or shopped at a store and continue to receive. I am not actively seeking to remove them, but I am not engaging with them either.

I am going to be painfully honest here and say that I started with over 1000 unread emails. That feels unbelievable to even write.

If I get about 30 of these a day, then I have learned they add up quickly.

I started by going day by day through my emails but soon learned that didn’t feel very satisfying. Of course this is a personal feeling. Your attempt’s could be different.

Instead I started to search my emails by company. This would allow them to be grouped quickly and made my decision to delete each email so much simpler.

I would give a quick scan as I clicked away on each one to be deleted. This was to ensure that first it was an email I intended to delete and secondarily to identify ones that I specifically wanted to save. Ones that were proof of purchase for example.

While a lot of the projects I talk about are usually pretty quick, this one is forever a work in progress.

Have I been able to get down to zero yet? Not quite. But is has helped me unsubscribe to what I no longer need and feel more organized on what in now showing up in my inbox every day.

While an ongoing work in progress, it is decluttering my space in a virtual sense and bringing me joy in an unexpected way.