Upon reading The Power of Less: The 6 Essential Productivity Principals That Will Change Your Life, I received some good ideas for slicing away a lot of excess in the BUSY work that I do, including dealing with tasks and information.

I came up with some additional ways of dealing with specifically, Email, on my own. I think this book impacted me more, for the “why’s” of streamlining your information management, than the How’s of what he teaches as techniques.

Many of us in this Info-Age (this phrase sounds overly corny and Editorial-ish, but I’ll leave it in) receive pretty long Emails - basically entire Newsletters - that you spend time opening more than one time.

This repeated “attempted processing” of a Single Large email is due to having that initial attempt at opening it, reading it, but then leaving it in your Inbox to switch to something else, because you just don’t want to finish it — and you don’t want to try to THINK too hard on what subfolder in Outlook you want to throw it into.

The bottomline: In Outlook, or whatever email program that you use, that “un-bolds” the subject line when you’ve opened it one time, you’re becoming more and more uneasy and uncomfortable due to not being able to really identify ones you’re finished with or still need.

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