After ten months of a non-empty email inbox, I finally achieved Inbox Zero last week and I’ve managed to clear my inbox every day since. (Because once you get there, it’s easy to clear it, as long as you remain committed.) It seemed like a good day to repeat this blog post I wrote more than five years ago about achieving and maintaining Inbox Zero.
I’ve posted here before about how I achieve Inbox Zero. For years, I had an Inbox Zero habit, so that at the end of the workday, there would be no emails in my inbox. I have to admit that this year I let it slide. In recent months, my goal was 20 emails in my inbox at the end of the day, rather than zero. That proved to be an unsatisfactory goal—it deprived me of the thrill of an empty inbox. Until recently.
Two weeks ago, I emptied my inbox. I made the decisions necessary to move or delete messages. I forwarded some emails to Evernote so I could create reminders and then archived the emails.
Almost without exception, at the end of each day since, I’ve had an empty inbox. (A couple of days I left one or two messages in there to act on in the morning.) This makes the beginning of the day so much easier, since most of the emails that come in before I get up are spam (many them in Italian, weirdly) or news sources I read with my coffee. It’s easy to delete the spam and read, then delete or archive, the news.
I’ve had people scoff when I mention Inbox Zero and how much I enjoy it. I’ve seen organizing experts I respect writing that it’s not an achievable or worthy goal. But I’m here to tell you, my life is so much easier when I maintain my Inbox Zero habit.
Here is why I love emptying my inbox at the end of the day:
The best part is that when I have only one day’s email accumulation, it takes me less than five minutes to empty my inbox on a typical day.
I encourage you to give it a try. If you have a lot of emails in your inbox, here are some ideas for getting down to zero without too much angst.
Trust me, dealing with email is easier with a streamlined inbox. Inbox Zero is not only achievable, it can be easy to maintain when you commit to it. I’m so glad I’m back on track with it.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
I love the concept of vision boards, where you create a physical or digital collage that represents your hopes and dreams. I’ve made them in the past (and blogged about using the Comic Lite program to create them ). But it’s been a good long while since I created a vision board.
But that changed this year! My podcast co-host, Shannon Wilkinson and I did an episode of our podcast, Getting to Good Enough, about creating vision boards (and letting go of perfectionism around doing it perfectly). Here’s the episode, if you want to give it a listen: Episode 230: Creating a Vision Board.
Last month, we hopped on Zoom and created our vision boards together, which was really fun. It took only an hour, thanks to this terrific video that I found on YouTube about using Canvas and Pinterest to make it to create a vision board.
Here’s the video:
A couple of my photos in my vision board came from Pinterest, but others came from my computer or phone. I really let the process be easy (yay!) and I’m thrilled with the result.
My vision board is on display as the wallpaper for my laptop. In my setup, my laptop is hooked up to a larger monitor at my desk, so the laptop screen is unused. That means the wallpaper is on full display and I’m looking at my vision board many times a day. I also printed out a small version, pasted it in my Bullet Journal and annotated it with explanations of what each of the elements represents.
In case you’re curious, here’s the result, as displayed on my computer.
If you have a little time, I encourage you to give it a try!
I love The Container Store’s Elfa system of closet solutions and drawers. I use lots of Elfa in my home and recommend to clients all the time. The extra-narrow cabinet-depth drawer drawer systems, for example, are game changers for under the bathroom sink! (That’s a picture of one with this post.)
If you’re interested in Elfa, now’s a great time to buy. Between now and February 12, all Elfa is 30 percent off.
I use Elfa in my own home, in a closet in my office and to store my yarn stash. I also use three different Elfa file carts in my office, one for my business archives, one for my genealogy papers and one for the files that I want close at hand. That one lives under my desk.
I’ve been using and recommending Elfa for fifteen years and the quality has remained consistent, I’m happy to say!
I went to New York City early Friday morning for a fun weekend with my college besties, which is why I didn’t post my final tiny projects challenge post on Friday. But the trip itself inspired the tiny project, which I did after I got back. I decluttered my travel toiletries bag.
Like many people, I keep a bunch of travel-sized toiletries assembled so I don’t have to pack a lot of them when I travel. On travel day, I add a few things I use daily. Everything fits in my toiletries bag. But it’s all pretty much a jumbled mess.
So while I was unpacking last night, I decided to declutter my toiletries bag.
Here’s how it looked before I started:
I pulled everything out and gave it a quick sort on the dining room table:
There were many things I didn’t know were in there that I’m sure I put in thinking I’d feel like a genius if I needed them. But if I don’t even realize I have them, they’re not much help.
So I edited out a few items, like duplicate shampoos and creams, a sewing kit, and makeup remover, since I really don’t use makeup any more. I stashed my lipstick in my desk drawer. Then I put back the keepers and called it a day.
Here’s the after photo. (Total time: 10 minutes, tops.)
Everything will be much easier to access, which will be wonderful.
It got me thinking about the things that I add at the last minute to that bag when I travel. I think it might be worthwhile to buy an extra set of those things (toothpaste, deodorant, and vitamin C serum fall into that category), so I don’t have to do much of anything to pack. I use an electric toothbrush and I don’t want to invest in a duplicate, but I do keep a duplicate charger for the toothbrush in my suitcase. (I learned that the hard way.)
This is the end of my tiny projects series for this year. I’ll almost certainly do more next year. I love tackling these little decluttering and organizing projects!
Today’s tiny project is a high-impact five-minute fix. I dealt with my snack chips.
I love chips. My favorites are Wavy Lay’s Hickory Barbecue and Simply Cheetos Crunchy. I also like tortilla chips and pretzel chips. (Please don’t judge.)
When I decided how to store my chips in my new kitchen back in 2016, I underestimated the number of different chips I’d like to have on hand. So, of course, it got very unruly up in there.
Here’s a photo of the ridiculousness I was tolerating:
It took me five minutes to bring the chips out and toss the expired ones as well as the bags with measly crumbs. That left me with just four bags to store. I might have squeezed them into the exixting container, but I knew I needed more room. So I grabbed the white bin I formerly used for my bulk spices and put the chips in there.
Here’s the after photo:
Ahhh, so much better. I’ll pull out the bin to access the chips, which will probably keep them more orderly. And now I won’t have to cram in chips and shut the cupboard door quickly. That was a high-impact five minutes!
For this tiny project, I turned my attention to winter coats and accessories. We store most of our winter wear at the top of our back steps. (We live on the second floor of a two-family home and my offices and the guest room are on the first floor.) There’s not a lot of space there and it’s just a 36” rod and shelf and no door. It’s not beautiful, but it is functional.
Except it was starting to get crowded.
Here’s a before photo:
I started with the coats. In just three feet of space, 23 coats were hanging. Fourteen of them were mine and nine were Barry’s. (I was so surprised I had so many!) I focused on my coats and very quickly sorted out seven that I wanted to keep, five that I wanted to donate, and two that I moved to the basement, just in case. That took about five minutes. Barry will go through his coats on his own (I hope).
Here’s how that rod looked after only five minutes of decluttering and another five minutes of moving the donations out.
Then I turned my attention to the hats, scarves and gloves that we store there. Some were in plastic shoe boxes (one sweater box and two large shoe boxes) on the shelf. I knew going in that I would be able to let go of a lot and that I should relocate anything I keep because I hadn’t opened those boxes in probably five years.
Here’s a photo of the shelf:
It was a simple thing to pull the plastic boxes onto the kitchen counter. The sweater was full of hand-knitted (by me) scarves. I took a look and my first thought was, “I can’t donate those. I made them.” And I put them right back in the bin. But I sat with it for a couple of minutes and realized that of course I can donate them. I’m not using them, nor will I. I can always make more (and, in fact, have). So I took all the hand knits except one and put them in the donate bag.
Then I sorted out the other stuff on the shelf, most of it my husband’s, and laid them out on the kitchen counter. (I moved the spray paint to the basement and kept the WD-40 there because that’s where we’d look for it.) On that shelf, there were three left gloves (go figure). We’re going to hang on to those in hopes of finding the corresponding right gloves downstairs. If we find the mates, we’ll donate two of the pairs. Barry let go of a few accessories and we moved a few things to the front door (a project for another day). (Since we walk Bix from the front door and go to our cars from the back door, we store different accessories in each place.)
Here’s a photo of the shelf when I finished. (Definitely a “good enough” finish line.)
But I wasn’t finished, because there were also three baskets of such accessories on the window sill.
On the windowsill, I found the hood and other accessories for one of the coats I was donating (it felt good to put them all together for donation). I also found a bunch of gardening gloves, which I’ll wash and store more appropriately, and a few hats. All I kept were the detachable hood from my current winter coat, the pussy hat I knit in 2017 and, for Barry, one scarf and one hat. I moved a sun hat to the shelf above the coats.
Here’s how the windowsill looked when I finished.
The second part of this project took about 20 minutes. The whole area feels much better and now we can easily put our hands on the items we use. Again, it’s a great reminder of what a half hour of focused decluttering energy can reap! I encourage you to give it a try.
For today’s tiny projects challenge, I chose the bulk herbs and spices that were outgrowing the container they were stored in in one of our cabinets. In 2016, we renovated our kitchen and at that time chose a Kuggis container from IKEA to store the herbs and spices that came in anything other than a bottle. (The bottles of herbs and spices live in a pull outs next to the range.)
In order to access the bulk herbs and spices, we had to dig through them, which is obviously less than optimal. Last month, I purchased The Everything Organizer XL Cabinet Depth Pantry Bin with Dividers from The Container Store, thinking it would work well for this project. I was very happy when it did!
Here’s the messy before picture, with the bin inside the cabinet.
And here’s how the bin looked when I took it out of the cupboard and put it on the counter.
It was a simple job to empty the container, throw out old or unloved spices and sort the remainder into categories. I used the new container I’d purchased for four of the categories, plus a separate pantry bin I had on hand. The project took less than 30 minutes.
Here’s the after picture, with all the herbs and spices stored neatly in the cupboard.
(I know that black-on-clear labels for clear bins isn’t standard, but my husband really prefers less obtrusive labels, so it works for us.)
Everything fits into the categories at the moment, but this may take a little maintenance effort in order to keep the categories from merging.
These are the categories I created in the divided container:
The separate container holds:
My husband is the main cook in this house the main user of the bulk herbs and spices. He says he thinks this will work well for him. It’s certainly an improvement!