Now if I can only do the same with my stuff…I am moving to a much smaller cube and I won’t need any of the trappings (files, books, tools) of my old job. I will be in major purge mode for the next week.

On Gmail, where the temptation to keep messages forever is great, I mark many of my messages “Delete-”. So things like discount coupons, etc. that I want to keep, just in case, but which are useless in a month’s time, I can keep in my Inbox where I’m reminded of them, but they’ll automatically be removed when I delete the messages next month. I also use these for chat transcripts or interesting things that I might want to refer to over the coming weeks, but which have no long-term value. I consider it my wishy-washy-but-not-forever folder/label/whathaveyou.

My personal e-mail inbox – that’s a whole other story.

–Shalin

“Some people mistakenly try to engage all the bits, all the time, with an ‘always-on’ lifestyle. For example, a familiar sight in airports these days is Busy Man. He’s the one with the latest device in hand, scrolling through messages, or barking into a cell phone as he dashes through the terminal, oblivious to everyone and everything around him – the picture of stress and anxiety. On some level, Busy Man likes acting this way because it proves he’s important. The more bits he drowns in, the more urgent his work becomes; and urgency, to him, equates to importance. It also offers him a good excuse if he misses a meeting or acts rudely – he was ‘maxed out,’ after all, when it happened. Despite how it may appear, working in such a way is neither effective nor sustainable. Urgency and haste are not the way to manage bits properly.”

http://bitliteracy.com/chap1.html

After reading an email, if there’s no compelling reason to keep it (and “it might come in handy someday” isn’t a compelling reason) delete it. And if there is a compelling reason to keep it, archive it somewhere other than your inbox. I use Eudora to pick up my email from all my accounts (including Gmail) and I have a mailbox called File Folder for those kinds of things. I go through that every so often and delete things no longer necessary for reference. And all my Eudora mailboxes except the trash get backed up to an external hard drive at least once a week.

With Gmail, it also helps to go through the spam folder about once a week to see if something non-spam has ended up in there. Then, of course, you delete all the real spam. Yes, I know, Google dumps it automatically after 30 days, but if you’re going to look for genuine mail it’s a lot easier with only a week’s worth of mailbox mulch.

My husband couldn’t bear the thought of flat-out dumping over 3000 messages from his Outlook inbox at work, so he moved them all to a folder called “90 days.” If he hasn’t had any reason to look at any of that stuff in 90 days, it’s gone.

My way of staying sane is to keep only “action items” in my inbox. Everything else get filed away. It might get up to 140 action items at a busy/crisis time(like last week… ugh!), but once I’m done with that particular project, it’s back down to a manageable 20.