Oh, how I’d like to be Merlin Mann… master of the email demons, wizard of the inbox. (Also, brilliant and funny as hell.) He has a methodology for taming the beasts that lurk inside Gmail, Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird and Eudora, and his gleaming, empty inbox serves as a beacon of hope to all that it might be possible for you, too.
Of course, knowing something’s possible is a double-edged sword… at least, for those of us procrastinators who have yet to find the time to become inbox black-belts. (Yes, yes… the investment of time now will more than pay for itself in future productivity. Thanks for the tip. Now please look up the word “procrastinator.”)
That strikes especially close to home for me, because I’m married to someone with her own methodology… and with a yawning void on her computer that nature intended to be filled with unread messages from relatives of deposed rulers hoping to shift around a few million dollars.
If you’ve managed to scour your email client clean, what was your trick? Let us know by leaving a comment… or a tweet… anything but email.