Organizing my life, Part I: Conquering E-mail Clutter

So, hidden there among the many and varied challenges of running a business, I came to realize not too long ago that I was, in fact, extremely disorganized. I had some systems down, but nothing seemed to be working. I ran late to just about everything, I was constantly stressed out about deadlines, and although I've never missed a deadline in the 6+ years I've been a graphic designer, I've often found myself working long hours because I couldn't focus effectively during the day. I had put off doing something about my chronic disorganization for months, telling myself that I was just too busy because I was starting a business, and long hours are to be expected as I spend time trying to market myself on top of taking care of client work, but as I examined my life over the past several months, I realized that my problem wasn't being a new business owner ? it was that my time wasn't being used effectively, and I didn't have any systems in place to make sure I could be productive while working from home.

On a fine Saturday afternoon, wandering through the COOP in Harvard Square, I happened upon It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys by Marilyn Paul, PhD. Flipping through it briefly, I knew I had to pick it up.

In the book, Paul goes deeper than the typical "just throw most of your stuff out and create filing systems for the rest" approach found in many of the organization books I've read and she forces you to examine the emotional basis behind your disorganization. What thoughts and emotions are keeping you disorganized? What message are you sending to yourself through your disorganization? As I examined my life up to this point, I ended up realizing that my own disorganization was an act of rebellion against my childhood home, where my parents would pressure me to clean my room even though the rest of the house was a mess. Although I wasn't the neatest person in the world, at least my mess wasn't as bad as the mess I grew up in. The mind is incredibly good at talking itself into bad behavior when there's something worse to compare it to.

So, after I spent some serious time examining my mess to figure out where it came from, I was ready to develop systems to deal with it. And Paul goes step-by-step in the book; starting with ways to deal with the everyday maintenance of life, like dealing with bills, e-mail and clearing your desk to getting rid of stuff that isn't serving you. I haven't completely finished the book yet (I'm working through it bit by bit), but I have decided that, unlike previous attempts at organizing where I'd whip through my space like a wildfire throwing things out and creating file folders for others, only to find the mess creeping back in a couple of months later, I was going to take my new attempt at organizing my life one step at a time. The first step was cleaning up my e-mail box.

My e-mail and I have a long and sordid history. Between the various newsletters I subscribe to, responses from the blogs and forums I frequently comment on, communications from current and potential clients, and friends trying to get in touch with me, the time I spend checking and responding to e-mail was starting to swallow up the better part of my day. I tried scheduling a couple times a day for it; that didn't work, as so much e-mail kept coming that the couple of times a day stretched into over an hour each time I checked my e-mail. In addition, my current roommates refused to discuss what they deemed "issues with the apartment" (which translates here to "evidence that you live here being present in the common areas") in person, preferring instead to bring things up via e-mail. This alone resulted in a consistent decline in my productivity; both in the time spent engaging in hostile e-mail flame wars with my roommates and in time spent obsessing over how upset said e-mail flame wars made me.

Overall, I realized that my e-mail was causing a massive amount of stress in my life. To add to the abovementioned situations, I had a tendency to not delete or file away a large portion of my e-mail when I was very busy, which resulted in my inbox reaching a little over 2500 messages when I finally decided to do away with the clutter. Every time I opened Entourage, I had a miniature panic attack seeing all those e-mails, and whenever I saw another one of my roommate's various "you need to do things my way in order for me to feel comfortable in my home" e-mails, I could feel the rage and bitterness welling up inside me. I needed to do something about this.

In the book, Paul makes some great points about dealing with e-mail. She suggests setting specific times during the day to check e-mail, immediately discarding any messages that aren't specifically meant for you and quickly responding to things that require a quick response. She also recommends emptying your inbox once a week and keeping information-related e-mails in files for that purpose. But the best point Paul makes is about dealing with emotional issues or conflict via e-mail:

Do not use e-mail for emotional correspondence. If a misunderstanding has taken place, schedule a face-to-face meeting or get on the phone. E-mail arguments tend to be huge time wasters. If you write a hasty irritated response to an annoying e-mail, don't send it. Wait! Jobs have been lost because of emotional electronic correspondence.

As I looked back, I realized that the vast majority of my e-mail wasting time has been due to dealing with conflict via e-mail. I was surrounding myself with people who couldn't handle conflict in person, and constantly hid behind e-mail and personal blogs to express their displeasure at certain things, and I was feeding into their habit by chomping at the bit when I got one of these e-mails and dealing with the conflict at my desk out of irritation and anger instead of telling them, "I'd be happy to make time to discuss this in person; however, I'm not going to discuss it in e-mail." In fact, at one point I DID say that, but I still ended up continuing the conversation via e-mail when the folks in question wouldn't schedule a time to meet.

On Monday, I started working out a system for dealing with my e-mail. Although the system is still in progress, I managed to organize my e-mail folders, once a jumbled mess, into three inbox-specific folders:

1. deal with today;
2. deal with this week;
3. extra (for things like e-newsletters, horoscopes and other miscellanea);

and several general storage folders underneath that:

1. current projects;
2. old projects;
3. resources;
4. admin stuff;

I spent the better part of Monday organizing stuff into those folders, and deleted every e-mail that was over three months old. Now, I check my e-mail about once an hour, deal with what needs to be dealt with and file or delete the e-mail as soon as I'm done. I'm still working on eliminating emotional correspondence (it's hard for me not to speak my mind when it's a subject I'm passionate about, and when an interesting conversation starts up, it's near impossible for me not to join in), but at the very least I've limited the amount of it to joining in amiable debates with like-minded individuals rather than trying to deal with the conflict that inevitably rises from someone realizing that they aren't going to get me to do what they want me to do.

Slowly but surely, this organizing thing is starting to happen. Over the next several weeks, I'll be sharing more stories from my quest to get more organized, and hopefully, at some point, I'll finally get it this time.

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Dani Nordin is the principal of the zen kitchen, a graphic and web design studio specializing in eco-friendly marketing materials, branding, and standards-based web design. The studio helps small to large businesses and non-profit organizations create a more consistent and effective image, while helping them send an environmentally and socially responsible message to their target audience. For more information, visit http://tzk-design.com.