Inbox

Things are a little slow this week at the office, which is a welcome break from the frantic burst of activity that encompassed most of April and May and which lurks around the corner as the summer magazine deadlines approach. When these little lulls occur, we all try to take advantage of them. We come in a little later, we leave a little earlier, and those tasks that never seem to get done are slowly scratched off the To Do list.

Today, the focus is the dreaded Email Inbox. My coworkers and I held a mini-competition, with one of our graphic designers winning gold for having almost 8,000 items in his Inbox, with nearly 500 unread. I might suggest that this indicates a larger problem than Avoidance of Inbox Cleaning, but it wouldn't be polite.

I, however, took silver with almost 3,000 items in my Sent folder. You see, I have a horrible fear that the minute I delete something from my Sent folder, I will need to prove that I did, indeed, send the response. There's stuff in there from three years ago. Let's face it - if I haven't gotten in trouble for whatever I might have gotten in trouble for in three years, then the statute of limitations on prosecution has probably passed.

So today is the day! I'm going to tackle my personal mountain! And then I'm going to mock my coworker with the Inbox problem.