Like my email, all Gaul was divided into three parts.
“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” It’s not often that I get to use high school Latin, so even if it is a stretch. Normally it only helps when I go to the pharmacy or meet a very old Roman. Wasn’t yet useful when my nemesis asteroid meteorite countermeasure business was failing.
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
The different parts of Gaul had different ferocities, different customs, different levels of trade, and different languages. I will leave it as an exercise to the classic scholars among our readers to decide which type of email is like which of the regions or tribes.
The first type of email, I call “morning email,” though it does only arrive or be seen in the morning. I read it and “handle it.” Generally, this isn’t a problem for me or anyone else. The one hazard is that one piece of email might start me on a multi-hour task that should not have been started then given the other constraints and priorities.
The second type is what I call the “stuck email.” It gets glanced at and passed over for days, weeks, months, or even years. Understanding deal with this has been my (successful) holiday project. Getting rid of this has been my inbox zero focus.
I have now discovered a third type in my inbox. It is an email that I have skipped over but isn’t hard to handle. This third type is very different from the stuck email. Having dozens of such emails isn’t a problem the way having stuck email is. My initial inbox zero think was about keeping this stuff down to zero. I am not finding this valuable and after a couple of days stopped doing it. I am no longer counting these against inbox zero.
So, yes, I can now credit myself as having achieved zero inbox even with a hundred messages in my inbox. And with this, I believe that I finally have a true understanding of zero inbox.
