Fresh Start: The Email DMZ
Submitted by Merlin on January 4, 2006 - 6:48am.
Like a lot of the best fresh starts, this one’s a total psych-out; also, like most of the best ones, you won’t believe how well it works until you actually try it for yourself.
- Open your email program and create a new folder called “
DMZ” - Go to your email inbox and
Select All- You might alternatively choose all email older than n days
- Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder
- Go, and sin no more.
Is this the email equivalent of covering your ears and singing loudly? Not really. You still need to deal with all the emails in your DMZ folder (personally I’d recommended “archiving” anything older than 21 days), but, most importantly, you’re drawing a line in the sand. You’re saying “Okay, starting this minute I quit letting ‘being behind’ stop me from making good decisions now and going forward.” Hence the “fresh start.” Get it? Tomorrow morning you arrive to a spanking fresh inbox and the chance to start anew. Of course, using your fresh start to develop an actual new habit is entirely optional, but it’s certainly more reachable than ever now, right? Right.
Basically, this works at accomplishing the one thing you need more than anything else right now: to stop digging.
Think about it: how much stuff in your life has gotten unmanageable simply because you decided at some point that you were too behind to ever make a difference? More than anything you need a way to recover these projects from the brink – to find the handle that lets you stop making it worse and start seeing a way back toward daylight.
(On another day, I’ll tell you my super-secret way of paring down the biggest DMZ folder to empty in 15 minutes.)
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Agree--reveal super secret trick please! My...
Agree–reveal super secret trick please!
My email box is actually pretty decent. I have an @Action folder and an @InProgress folder. The In Progress folder is purely for reference email, and each project has its own subfolder. Nothing goes into @Progress unless it’s in a subfolder. All emails that require action, for any project, go into @Action. When the action is completed, I move the email into the project subfolder or directly into @Reference.
When the project is done, I move the entire project subfolder into @Reference. I also throw miscellaneous “might need to look at again one day” emails into @Reference.
And of course I have (wait for it) an @Waiting. I bet you know what that’s for. I tend to forget about this one, so I have a daily reminder in Outlook “check @Waiting paper and email.”
Simple vanilla GTD and it works just swell.