I’ve been keeping my gmail inbox clean recently, and it’s been really successful. It definitely helps me keep tabs on the things I need to take care of- instead of remembering stuff at random, I can just skim down the 10 or 15 e-mails that I keep there and figure out what still needs to be done. The feeling is so much more peaceful than my old system, which was mostly just forgetting things I needed to remember until I was (maybe) reminded of them at some point.
Of course what this whole operation hinges on is having the correct organizational system. In the past, I had selected every e-mail and just archived them all, which of course doesn’t solve any problems. I still had tons of garbage flowing into my inbox and nowhere to put it. It took a while, but setting up a system of labels and filters that I need was crucial to making this a system I could maintain. I wonder if this lesson is applicable to my real life… After all, though clicking a label (or dragging and dropping now, thanks google) is almost effortless, moving one t-shirt or bank statement takes no more than a few seconds.
When I first moved in, I think I had a pretty good system for everything- it was summer, so all of my cold clothes were tucked away in the top of my closet and I had only a small amount of mail and paperwork to deal with. Fast forward several months (to summer again), all of my warm clothes are hanging on the back of my door, there are clothes that I need to return to the store in a box on my floor and little piles of mail are tucked into random places haphazardly. For this is the one way in which my gmail system is totally inapplicable to my apartment- the space problem.
I know I am underutilizing a lot of space in my room and my closet, but nonetheless, it certainly is handy that in gmail I can add an extra label for whatever I want, and for all intents and purposes, put as much or as little as I please in there. In my apartment, space has to be shared. My socks and underwear need to cohabitate. But I think this problem is more solveable than I realize. I need to create a practical, sustainable system. This means my shoes can’t belong in a drawer somewhere, sweatshirts can’t require being folded or hung, shirts can’t be so tightly packed that there’s no room for a few that are sloppily returned to the drawer when I decide not to wear them. I need a place for jewelry and makeup- although I don’t have much of it, it can’t just sit on my desk. And above all, as always, I need to throw things out. I need to get rid of boxes and packaging. I need to dispose of my bank statements, or better yet, stop receiving them at all. (Follow up: DONE)
Let’s do this thing.
