Quick Report: Burning Through E-Mails

Taking time off from the other site to get rid of some distractions came with mixed success this week. The goal was to get caught up on my e-mails. I managed to get my personal box cleaned out recent, which was a nice victory, but the one I use for most of my projects still had a huge build-up from my 2016 medical crises (yes, sadly more than one) that I’ve been fighting to keep out of the 1000s for a while now.

Added to the problem is that for some reason I didn’t sleep well this week because I had…well, some of you might be eating. Suffice it to say my waste disposal issues came into play. It cut the time that I had to go through the various virtual letters, newsletters, and advertisements, and there were a lot of them. Losing part of a day to a brief power outage thanks to a storm that hit the state didn’t help any. Adding to the time issue was that some of them were rather long videos, some as short as 4-8 minutes or something but others reaching almost a half hour. That’s in addition to the YouTube backlog I barely scratched the surface of, and some of them that were YouTube hosted videos I shoved into my ever expanding “watch later” list, which means the other backlog that I’ll have to burn through if I ever get the recent videos backlog dealt with. I’m still trying to catch up with May on that one. More advantageous was anything that was outdated or wasn’t something I was interested in among the other things in the newsletter I was just went away while I focused on evergreen stuff or things that I really wanted to check into. Hopefully I haven’t missed anything interesting, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss anything important.

As it stands however, as I write this, I did manage to get up to 2020 in the project-tied e-mails, so while not a complete victory it’s certainly better that I had. With luck I can polish this off after you read this and get on to the last thing I wanted to do before resuming my other website. Whether that will be both things I wanted to do or just one depends on how long those things take plus an event that probably won’t let me work on the computer at all for a day, so I already know I’m going to lose a day. Still, the most distractions I can get rid of the sooner I can stop holding ground and finally move forward. All the medical issues (save Crohn’s and allergies) are dealt with and it’s time to finally get rid of the rest of the garbage 2016 saddled me with and get on with what I really want to be doing. I’ll take the light though I’d really like to get out of this @#$# tunnel now, thank you very much.

END OF THE DAY UPDATE!: I am now completely caught up with my emails! Now there’s just YouTube, the DVR, the RSS feed…

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Victory On The Email Project

Well, I did it. Actually I went a bit over the current goal but still not fulfilling the complete goal. My immediate goal was to get both my “work” and “personal” emails read up to 2018. I did that with the “work” email but the personal email was actually a lot easier. While the “work” email has potential “evergreen” articles I can use for my other site (and even some for this one should I resume this project or just not have time to do a full project, which has happened, the “personal” account had mostly offers for stuff that are no longer valid and outdated news reports. So I ended up cutting out a lot of it. That one is pretty much done, though I still have more in the “work” email to go through.

Meanwhile I’ve managed to keep up to date with new articles, being a day or two behind at the most thanks to what I’ve learned doing this. That’s certainly going to make things easier. Hopefully I won’t need another email project to get all caught up but it could be a good project if I’m tired or otherwise too ill to do any of the major project or a photo shoot for reviews, which will leave me with potential filler articles for you guys in the future.

However I do want to get back to the physical projects. With luck next week will be the redo of the homemade drawer dividers. Of course my plans aren’t always successful so we’ll have to wait and see.

Filler Article: 5 Common Clutter Mistakes (plus email project update)

So this weekend (if you count Friday) basically took a bit out of me and I didn’t get started on stuff the way I wanted. That and making the mistake of dealing with both my e-mail backlog and my YouTube backlog at the same time (needing a nap after getting a late start hurt me too) meant I only got to clean out e-mails from June back to half-way through March. This was a goof on my part. Using the YouTube videos to give my eyes a break isn’t a bad idea, but trying to listen to videos I didn’t need to watch (and of course watching the ones I did) while going over newsletters to see if there was anything to read, linking to the website to read it when the video was done, and then going over all those tabs was not as helpful as I’d hoped. Kind of annoyed really as I’ve been doing so well I was convinced I’d get through 2019 this week, at least for the “work” e-mail backlog.

Meanwhile, I came across an article about the five common mistakes of clutter organizing…or the lack thereof…and admittedly I’m probably guilty of a few of these myself. Though as longtime readers know I prefer to make my own organizers out of cardboard rather than spend money on fixed dividers.

Email Update + Article Link: Declutter The Home Office

First, an update on the project: Continuing my trip backwards in time (that’s how it feels anyway) I’ve gotten through all the emails up to June of 2019. However, I did have some help because a few months are missing, probably due to one of my previous attempts at this. I found there were a few emails I missed, like one around December 2019 that I’m sorry I missed and I can’t wait to see how many of those I had in 2016, when all my medical issues went down. Will keep you posted.

Going through these emails has found me a few “evergreen” articles I can use for my other site, and thanks to some clutter-clearing sites I’m subscribed to a few articles to have something on this site during the virtual clean-up. To that end here’s an article from Simply Leigh Organized, a professional declutterer, on how to make your home office less of a mess. On a similar wavelength I found a piece of cardboard I’m hoping will be perfect for redoing the DIY organizer in my art supplies drawers and as soon as I’ve reached my goal of at least getting through all of 2019 (which includes two separate email accounts, the work account and the personal one) I can get to work on that. So there is a new project in the future.

Quick Report: Email & Hiatus

This week I did some more email catching up. I was hoping to finish the whole year’s worth of emails. Yes, my backlog is that bad. I only made it to April, as if to further emphasize the point. I think I want to focus my Saturdays on getting caught up on this project, but it’s kind of boring to write “I did more emails” week after week so I think I’m going to pull away from new reports until this is done, or at least until I catch up to 2019. On both my work email and my personal one, the latter of which I didn’t even get to. If I take time to do other projects, like if I get the cardboard I need to redo the art supply drawer, or some other project that needs to be done, I’ll report on it. Otherwise there won’t be new updates until the clear 2019 emails goal at least is reached.

If you’re curious what else I’m up to in the meantime, check out my other website, where I discuss the art of storytelling via various methods. Some reviews I’ve done here came from there and vice versa, and of course the book report I do comes after the Chapter By Chapter weekly reviews. Otherwise I hope to be back here soon when I have projects to report on but these inboxes aren’t going to clean themselves and I’ll be using the methods discussed in previous email-clearing articles. Stay safe and keep decluttering!

More E-Mail Decluttering

It was too hot up here in the attic HQ to do any work, and I’m going to need stronger cardboard to redo the mini-drawer organizers anyway. (I may have to design them before putting them in, which should be a good project. The set in there now is the result of being designed as I went rather than really planning anything out.) So this week I went through my e-mails.

My e-mail box gets cluttered up a lot. Not counting the year I was away from my computer most of the time due to being in the hospital the various projects I work on doesn’t always leave me time to really go through them. I do have some tips for how to make it easier and I even manage to take some of my own advice on this. Sadly, not enough or this wouldn’t be a recurring topic on this site, now would it? 😉

Quick Project: Yet More E-Mail Clearing

It happened again. Surprise events pulling me out of the house and one I actually did schedule in advance and plan for, took time away from other projects. Luckily the virtual clutter cleaning is important too, just like the physical cleaning. That big mound of unread emails feels ready to collapse on you every time you go to your email browser or site of choice. And this is only one of a few email accounts I have to go through, although others are mostly open because I have to read that backlog or I don’t currently remember how to get into them. So I made a dent in that project. Not a big enough dent for my liking but at least I accomplished something off of the board. I should update that picture with what I have left.

Quick Report: More Email Clearing

I had another toy review but I couldn’t get upstairs enough last week to do the photo work. But I wanted to do something this week, so I went back into my email backlog and deleted a bunch of emails whose links didn’t work anymore or didn’t have anything of interest to me today. I got a pretty huge chunk out. This time I had them listed by sender and deleted anything outdated or from junk email. Unfortunately I still have a major lot of emails to go through before I’m done. Still, a victory is a victory. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to do my photo shoot and do a proper review. It’s another knockoff combiner team from Quick Change.

E-Mail Reading And DVR Watching

English: email envelope (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week I was able to do two projects at once…and not get as far as I’d like at either. I wanted to fix some issues with my computer caused by some bad Windows updates but I didn’t know what to delete so I don’t know what to do there. So after stewing over that longer than I should have I started going through my emails. I have two email boxes with emails going back to 2012 and possibly sooner, and there’s just a huge build-up. And I have a number of shows and movies on my DVR and I wanted to get through some of them. So how does one do both?

Commercials!