Perhaps the most time I personally spend on email is staring at lingering emails. I bet I average about 5 of them at any given time. Emails that are just sitting there and I know they need some kind of action or response, I just can’t get it done for whatever reason. Maybe I don’t know what to say yet. Maybe I just can’t spend the time right now on what it needs.
It’s not all bad. Maybe letting it sit there and having my brain re-visit it periodically is what it needs for the right answer to be come to. But then there comes a point where I just can’t look at it anymore. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t anymore. Maybe I start to resent it or something. There definitely is a breaking point though, where I literally think “Done. This needs to be gone.”
At that point, I either force myself to deal with it or move what needs to be done somewhere else, like a TODO list. In rare cases I just delete it.
This of course makes me wonder if I should constantly be clearing out the inbox before I start to resent emails, inbox zero style. But I’ve had that thought many times and have never moved on it. Again, like I said, I think forcing my brain to revisit the email many times over and over is what it takes to deal with it.
Do you deal with the lingering email issue?
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