Zen Your Life Thursday: Inbox Makeover
Posted by Goddess Leonie on March 4th, 2010. Filed under: Zen Thursday.
Hey beautiful hearts!
Each Thursday, we hang out together as a gaggle of goddesses & make our gorgeous lives a little clearer, calmer and more zen. We do one Zen Your Life project together for the day… an easy, possible kind of project… just one small thing to make our lives more zen.
When we make space in our lives, we are making room for even more delight, comfort, magic and love to enter.
Sound like yummy delicious fun? Want some more zen goodness in your life?
Hurrah! Let’s start! We can doooo eeeeeeeet!
Today, your Zen Your Life project is:
Get your inbox down to zero.
Once upon a time, I had an inbox that was bursting at the seams. I think there was 300+ unread emails in it spreading back over a year. And I gnashed my teeth, and I worried, and I felt like I had to go back and answer every single email, and check every single notification, and respond and reply.
Then a friend staged an email-intervention for me. Everything that wasn’t a business email was deleted. Everything that was over two months old was sent off into the winds. Everything that wasn’t crazy-wild-urgent-important was kissed goodbye.
And with it, a whole heap of worry, and angst, and feeling like I-didn’t-have-my-crap-together.
So here’s my three stage process of helping your inbox be lovely and zen again:
1. Do not use your inbox as a To Do List.
Create a separate To Do list in your To Do List book, using Todolist.com or just on a piece of paper. Write down anything you need to do, then archive the email. If you need it later when it comes to doing that task, just search for it.
2. Archive anything that does not absolutely need a reply.
Top secret secret: Not all emails need replying to. I used to think they did, but if every single person replied to every single email they ever received, we wouldn’t be doing anything but answering emails or crying about answering emails. Please do the world a favour and not reply to every email. It makes less reply-work for every one of us.
3. If an email is older than two months old, chances are, it just needs to be said goodbye to.
Honour it, give it love, and archive it.
4. Unsubscribe from every notification and newsletter out there unless it makes your life amazingly better.
Because your life needs you living it, not sitting in your inbox.
5. Work through the rest of your emails from top to bottom.
No going back. No skipping around. Put an album on, close all your other browser windows, and just work through it step by step. If you don’t feel like replying with a thousand words, don’t wait until you do. Just reply with what you have, right now. Follow your spirit and your energy. Release your expectations and perfectionism and worries and fears about getting it right. Stop feeling obligated to answer the way that you do. You do not have to answer emails as deeply, thoughtfully, quickly or verbosely as you think you do. Let your love and light shine in other ways… ways that you feel radiant and joyous as you do it. Let it be through creating, or through physical action. Give your energy the freedom to be released from have-to’s.
Remember: You are a gift. Your energy is a gift. Use it in powerful ways to make a change.
Need some accountability?
You can use the above buttons on your blog, and photograph your progress. You can check-in to the Comments Circle. You can write out your Zen Goddess goal on a scrap of paper beside you.
Whatever you need to do to give yourself the support you need, do it.
Loving you, fellow Zennifying Goddessa!
March 4th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Oh Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am zen-ing my mail box from now on!
March 4th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Oh you are so welcome, radiant Goddess Mary… I adore you… and am wishing you the sweetest of zen breezes… xoxoxo
March 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
I find the relentless emails from facebook drive me up the wall! I’m going in to change the settings, it comes up on fb anyway so if it’s something you want to look at you don’t need to be told twice! The follow up comments here are a different thing altogether though! Those are very much welcome in my inbox!
Thank you for helping this chaotic Libran to stop procrastinating!
Liza xo
March 4th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
WONDERFUL advice!!!
March 4th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Goddess Liza ~ OMG! Yes! The Facebook notifications! Once I turned all of them off, I realised I totally didn’t need them… because I check Facebook at least once a day anyway, and I can check the notifications there
Goddess Bobbie ~ Awww… thank you sweetpea!
March 4th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
I needed these suggestions! I tend to hold onto all kinds of things much longer than I need to. Gmail
has a great system for archiving with labels that I use frequently. Lately I’ve been letting my inbox get the better of me. I’m just going to hunker down, archive what I really need, & delete the rest.
March 5th, 2010 at 12:45 am
[...] gibt jede Menge Anregungen im weltweiten Netz. Heute, beim Stöbern im Google Reader habe ich diese hier bei “Goddess Guidebook” gefunden: Inbox [...]
March 5th, 2010 at 2:54 am
Wooooah, this was a hard one for me. I have six emails in my inbox that I WANT to reply to, but I don’t know what to say, so they just sit there and stare at me and generate guilt. Oy oy. I haven’t archived them yet, but I made myself a promise: if I don’t reply by Sunday night, I archive them. I feel good about that.
The rest of ‘em, I just ditched. (; Or responded to right away.
Thank you! This is so good! <3
March 5th, 2010 at 2:57 am
Great suggestions. Except that I then get stuck on archiving. And recently I’ve started being much harsher about what I keep and what I don’t. Sometimes you can answer and DELETE. Or read and DELETE.
I keep read e-mail in my inbox so I don’t have to remember where I might have filed something and can just search the inbox if I need stuff. But the unread stuff is at the top and your suggestions are a great way to deal with that.
I also recently created a separate folder called “Needs a reply” so I can put stuff I need to reply to but want to wait a bit in there and it won’t get lost in all the other stuff.
March 5th, 2010 at 3:36 am
Goddess Leonie…I just have to begin by saying how much I adore you and your presence. Your blog, your meditations, your videos and your spirit has altered my life in such amazing ways…you have given me the space to really step into who I was meant to be. So thank you, thank you, thank you…big hugs to you.
Now, on to zennifying my life. I just completed the project of clearning out my inbox and surprisingly it feels light and freeing. What a wonderful suggestion. I can’t wait to clear more from my life, but will wait mostly for the creating your haven class to begin as I plan on signing up this weekend for it….I really look forward to more classes.
Much Love,
Laura
March 5th, 2010 at 6:53 am
Yay! I did it. It was much easier than I thought it would be too. I love it when things are easier than you expect. It makes the acomplishment so much bigger. Thanks for the challenge!
March 5th, 2010 at 7:30 am
This was amazing! I had over 100 pages of e-mails so I just put almost everything into my Archive folder. It’s all things I’m just hanging onto for information purposes, nothing I have to do about any of them. I also made a Needs a Reply folder ala JoVE. What a concept!
March 10th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Leonie, how about suggestions for a Zen Bookmark List in my web browser? I probably have hundreds of sites that I never use, and because I have so much clogging up the list I can never find the ones I do use, so I end up googling to find them anyway.
It’s probably going to be similar to the Zen Inbox suggestions, but having clear-cut steps make it so much easier.