One of the things about this new job, is the email. Now, I like to have a large inbox. I find searching for stuff within Outlook a lot more satisfactory than trying to find stuff within the wider world of windows. (I use a lovely Mac at home) So I’m happier to leave stuff in the inbox than file it somewhere and then have to try and remember where I put it. Which means I have also been happy to leave a running total of fifteen hundred or so emails in my inbox.
But this new job seems to come with larger attachments. Regional Operations and Planning Group papers, mystery visitor reports, and spreadsheets detailing weekly sales in Catering and Retail, with fancy graphs and the like. And these big attachments have been filling up my inbox every day, to the extent that I’m forbeidden to send any emails until I’ve dealt with and deleted the biggies. That’s no way to prioritise my working day. So I’m going to have to train myself to be more disciplined with email, keep the inbox as clear as I can. To this end, I’ve set up ylthe age-old “Action/Filed/Later” system and programmed Auto-Archive to be brutal in archiving filed stuff after just five days.
I could be more disciplined elsewhere too. I have a reputation for keeping my desk piled high with paper. I’d already set the challenge to myself of keeping my new desk a lot tidier. Perhaps the “Action/file/later” method should appear physically too.
