I hate email and I love email

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Email. It's something that's probably not going away anytime soon and it has tremendous value, but it also tends to distract very quickly and can really own me if I'm not careful.

I'm guilty of being a slave at work to my email inbox. I've also been a slave to trying to file everything away, only to never ever look for the email filed away again. I wish there was a way that would just read my mind and take care of my emails once I've read them in a way that makes sense to me, but that doesn't exist. I wish there was a way to always find the exact email that I remember seeing a few days earlier or months ago, which sometimes I can find and sometimes I can't.

I don't think there's a perfect system, but I have found in the last month some help in checking my email less frequently and placing emails I don't have time for at the moment into one of three folders, Answer, Hold or Read. Everything else gets responded to when I check my email because it took 2 minutes or less. I'm not doing this perfectly, but I'm trying to get better at it, so I can focus on the work I need to be doing rather than the quick one-off requests that come in all through out the day.

I'm sure this will continue to evolve, but it's at least a start to tackle this challenge.

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