I live in my e-mail inbox, and I’m a slave to it. The problem is I get too much e-mail, and I constantly am having to process it.

I’m organized, though. I have a workable filing system among my local folders that helps me keep track of the various cover and art projects that I either do or delegate to others. It makes a neat archive for referencing and for keeping me from getting one project confused with another, which is a good thing because I track hundreds of various projects and a staff of artists. I put all related e-mail into the proper project folder, and I never have problems searching for them days, weeks, or months later.

So my archives look great. It’s the inbox that does me in.

I have my inbox set to dump anything older than three months. It allows me to keep in there stuff that I’ve read and might need later but that isn’t important enough to file away forever or junk enough to outright delete. It saves me from having to go through everything later with a fine-toothed comb and dumping everything not a keeper, which I hate doing because the act of deleting mail is so much more time and trouble than letting the server delete it for me—when I delete it, it goes to the Trash folder, and then I have to go to the Trash folder and delete it again. Insane! So I reserve that insanity for stuff I instantly know I don’t want to keep, like spam, and I just clear the Trash folder periodically. The rest? They stay in the inbox until the server quietly dumps them three months later, and if I find I need them beforehand, they’re all still there.

But that set up isn’t what makes my inbox scary. What makes it scary is that I also keep in there the items on which I need to act and the items to which I need to respond. Yeah, that’s right. E-mail that I need To Do and To Respond To remain in the inbox, marked as unread, tagged with coded colors to grab my attention every time I dive in, and sitting among all the other e-mail I refer to as, “Eh. The server will delete those eventually.”

Now imagine that everything is sorted by date and that all those “unread” important e-mail messages are among all the “have read” messages not important enough to file and not junk enough to delete outright. You know how I get down to answering old e-mail that needs a response? I click the various sort buttons—by Unread and by Tag—so that the cream rises to the top for me to take a closer look at them.

Feel free to shudder, but it has worked well for me all these years—that is, so long as I acted on and responded to everything within three months and so long as I didn’t get buried in more than 2,000 new e-mails in between my e-mail checkings.

And this is where the super scary part of my inbox comes in.

I should probably note that I keep my e-mail set to IMAP, not POP. That is to say, I keep the contents of my inbox on the e-mail server, and I don’t automatically download it to my hard drive. I do this for three reasons—the first being that it allows me to have that nifty dump-in-three-months setting I mentioned, the second being that it keeps my hard drive relatively free of crap, and the third being that it makes it really handy to access my e-mail from any computer, Mac or PC, via an e-mail program or via web mail. That last is especially important to me because I work on at least two different computers and need access to the same e-mail messages on both.

[RandomRant]God, I wished Gmail allowed IMAP access!!! Come on, Google, get with it already![/RandomRant]

But anyway, back to the super scary part … my e-mail server has this thing about saving space, so if I receive more than 2,000 messages between now and tomorrow, everything else in the inbox disappears, thrown out into the ether, regardless of whether it’s been three months or three days when I first received them and whether or not I’ve had a chance to really look at them or do anything about them. It’s an insane mail server rule I can’t really change for some reason, so I get a little anxious about losing messages when I go away on a trip for a week or so.

Everything is fine if I check and process my e-mail regularly, not so fine if I get bombarded before I’ve had a chance to process everything currently in the inbox.

So it’s an issue regularly on my mind, especially now that I have a trip planned in October. I’m doing what I can to get ahead and process a lot of the e-mail I’ve left in my inbox to respond to or to do something about later.

And then I watched this: Inbox Zero.

OK, OK, so I get it. I should move the e-mail messages that need action or response to another folder, something I’ve been thinking about anyway because it’s the only thing that keeps the server from wiping them out when the three months time or 2,000 messages maximum has been reached. But, ew. I find that this actually requires a little more work upfront for me.

So I’m zeroing in on my inbox. It will take me a while to get to where I want to be, even more organized than my sorry ass probably already is. H.E. thinks I’m already more than anally retentive; he believes I’m organized at the uber OCD levels. But the truth is that I see myself as utterly sloppy, every aspect of my life cluttered to the nth degree. My desk is a total mess, all the while organized into nice neat mountainous piles of stuff I need to process or file.

I don’t know how I get anything done.

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