800 messages processed per day

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Over the past few days I’ve held off on emptying my deleted items folder in Outlook to get a better sense of the number of messages I “process” per day.  The average over the past three days with very little varyance per day was 800 per day.  Granted this does include RSS feed posts I go through but it is still several hundred without them.


This doesn’t include IM, voice mail, meeting requests, personal email or text messages.


The bad news is that I am not getting to zero in my inbox each day either so there is some “carry” from one day to the next.


I’ve got to come up with a better way to handle this.  I’ve read various GTD-esque things but at some point, the incoming flow and accumulation of tasks and meetings just doesn’t average out to zero per day.


Stay tuned…


Comments

One response to “800 messages processed per day”

  1. Two quick thoughts – you mention that you’ve tried some GTD style stuff, but I have found Merlin Mann’s “inbox zero” posts at 43folders pretty good, and I changed my autofilter rules as a result. Also, @Rands recently twittered an interesting suggestion: go to your outbox and tag the last 20 (or 200) outbound messages you sent. Doing so montiors both your own responses and suggests which types of messages/inputs actually get attention – then you can course correct your responses or re-jigger your inputs appropriately.

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