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O.K. a fresh start, is a fresh start. Fresh starts sound good, but when push comes to shove, it’s a little hard to “pull the trigger” on them. I want to qualify this blog by telling you that it may be the hardest suggestion that I’m going to offer you. But, fresh is fresh, and fresh works, so I want to strongly urge you to do this. I’ve done it myself and it works! Here’s how it goes… give it a try.
1. Open your email program and create a new folder.
* Call it whatever you want (“Old Stuff”, ‘Save”, whatever… I like the term “DMZ”, which is a networking term that stands for De-Militarized Zone).
2. Go to your email inbox and Select All
* You might alternatively choose all email older than n days
* The really hard part is coming. You ready?
3. Drag those emails from your inbox into the folder you just created (DMZ, old stuff, you know the drill) folder.
4. You’ve just created a “Fresh Start” for yourself. It may sting for a little while, but give it a bit.
Now that you’ve created this “Fresh Start” there are a lot of things that you could do. First and foremost, you have to deal with all the emails in your DMZ folder (my best recommendation would be to archieve anything more than 3 to 4 weeks old). Once you’ve done SOMETHING, regardless of what that might be, you have to take on a new attitude about your inbox. Otherwise, your inbox will be right back to where it was in just a few short days/weeks. Just like the grade school bully would keep pushing, your inbox will continue to push, so at this point you have to “draw a line in the sand” and say “enough is enough”. Basically, you have to commit to the thought that from this point forward you are going to quite letting “being behind” stop you from making good decisions. As a friend of mine would say; “Are you picking up what I’m throwing down?” This is that “fresh start” we’ve been talking about. Starting the very next time you open your email client, you will arrive to a almost fresh inbox and the chance to quickly return to the clean slate (I decided to change that because I thought you might be tired of hearing “Fresh Start”). You will have a number of messages that will have landed in your inbox since you created this DMZ, but that goal of a manageable inbox is more reachable than ever.
That DMZ folder I had you create is not intended to be the place you drag all your new messages into as they arrive. That would not be a fresh start, that would just be denial. But now that you’ve freed yourself of all that old “stuff” that’s been building up for day, months, or even years, you have the opportunity to keep that inbox under control and empty of the clutter forever more. I’ll give you some techniques to do exactly that over the next several days, but for now, let’s handle them this way. Read, handle/process and delete. In the few cases in which you simply cannot delete them, move them somewhere for safe keeping. We’ll move into more details about the best way to do that, tomorrow.
See you then,
Roger