I’ve just had a peek and I’ve got the best part of 200 new emails waiting for me at work. Mind you, at a glance, I’d say that almost all of them are spam, so routine job #1 (junking the spam that made it through the filters) will get that down to a much less daunting figure.

The other thing I might try to do this week if nothing pressing comes up is to dig back to the older end of my inbox and try to get some of the longer term ‘residents’ put to bed. I’m fairly good at staying on top of my email (compared to colleagues who seem to have thousands of messages sitting in their inbox including hundreds of unread ones) but some things to tend to sink down and rest there. In particular, it will be matters that aren’t urgent but seem a little complex. If the person on the other end doesn’t chase them, they get insulated from attention by more recent additions.

Typically my inbox has a residue numbered in low double digits and it is sometime since I last achieved ‘inbox zero’. I wonder if a few minutes spent sending out a few ‘is this still relevant’ messages might be a useful contribution to refreshing that end of things?