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…
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.