Simplify Your Life: Regain Control Over Your Inbox

By Jessica Hoelzel
 
Here’s the final tip from my 5 Tips for Proactively Managing Email:

5. Schedule time to set up folders for messages you want to keep on file. Take 15 minutes per day for one week to designate files and place messages in them. This should totally clean out your inbox, except for the newest messages you haven’t gotten to. Think seriously about whether you need to keep a message, though, before you just throw everything in there. Can you get the information elsewhere, say on a website? Can you request it again if you need it? (Make a note of the person’s contact information.) Do you want to print out a hard copy to put in a paper file? Does the content belong elsewhere in your computer, say in another file?

Read my earlier post for the lead-in to these tips. Utilize all 5, and you’ll be on your way to creating your life and work according to what really matters to you.

If YOU have tips to share, please click below to Post a Comment.

Simplify Your Life: Regain Control Over Your Inbox

By Jessica Hoelzel
 

Here’s the 4th of my 5 Tips for Proactively Managing Email:

4. UNSUBSCRIBE. Take your name off lists for information you don’t read or need. Be realistic about what you have the time and energy to take in. If you have subscribed to something that looks interesting, but turns to be different, ditch it. If you thought you’d have time, but have a backlog of messages, cancel it until you have more time. Usually the information you have an interest in can be found on the website, or you can request it again later.

Read my earlier post for the lead-in to these tips. And…stay tuned for the next tips. You’re on your way to creating your life and work according to what really matters to you.

If YOU have tips to share, please click below to Post a Comment.

Simplify Your Life

Yampa River, Steamboat Springs, CO June 2011

By Jessica Hoelzel

 

A very wise man, back in the 1850’s – when it seems life should have been far less complicated that it is today, wrote this:

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand, instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.”

That man was Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher, Naturalist, author of Walden.

What he wrote so long ago, his advice gleaned from pulling himself out of the busy shufflings of society, and into the tranquil balance of nature, is advice we should heed, now more than ever.

Now, our world can seem chaotic. Now, our world can seem like time is accelerating. Now, we need to focus on what really matters. And not let things that don’t clutter up our lives.

Time to get real. Time to re-focus. Time to live authentically, with what really matters: LOVE.

Be with the people you love.

Do what you love.

Surround yourself only with what you love.

There’s nothing more simple than that.