Fear of an empty inbox…
Like most of us, I’m overwhelmed by email. Thousands of messages piling up over time between work and home accounts. So today in response to a post on unclutterer I tried an experiment: I moved all of my email except for today’s out of my inbox and into an archive. I then went through and processed all of today’s email. The first thing I noticed was that my very real sense of relief was tempered with distress. I keep checking the box. It makes me realize that even though I feel overwhelmed by the big numbers, an empty email box is just as hard to deal with. Does it mean that noone is thinking about me? And what about the requests I’ve made of other people? What’s taking them so long to respond? (Those of you who know my own sins in this regard can stop rolling your eyes now). After a couple of hours and other messages coming in, there are two that I haven’t been able to process and thinking about them reveals a couple of interesting points:
1.Both of them are unresponded to because the next action I have to take on them requires a specific time commitment on my part. I am procrastinating on pulling the trigger. In one case because I have some misgivings, in another because I’m not so clear on my schedule.
2.I’m only understanding what’s up with these two because I can actually see them in the inbox. In other words, when the messages are in the hundreds, everything gets lumped into the “stuff I gotta do” mental category, which just grows and keeps me away from making real decisions.
So a cluttered inbox allows me to feel that there are lots of folks thinking about me and that I have a bunch of decisions to make, but that I can’t quite make any single one right now.
Scary!
Tags: clutter, daily photo, emotions, Self Sabotage
