Man, I never remember clothes, mine or anyone else's. Except for a very few particular times/outfits. Good thing most of my clothes are boring, because now I'm paranoid about other people noticing how often I repeat stuff!

Thinking about memory, though -- someone at work was giving me the "touch things only once" shpiel about email, and I was thinking about it, and the truth is, it's good for me to go through most of my emails more than once, because I'm expected to know a ton of stuff in my head, and that's how most of it gets there. If I read the email and file it immediately (even after acting on it), I'll never remember that it got done.

Huh, Bravo acquired TWoP. [link]

Maybe they won't have those atrocious Yahoo ads anymore.

Thinking about memory, though -- someone at work was giving me the "touch things only once" shpiel about email, and I was thinking about it, and the truth is, it's good for me to go through most of my emails more than once, because I'm expected to know a ton of stuff in my head, and that's how most of it gets there. If I read the email and file it immediately (even after acting on it), I'll never remember that it got done.

You have everything in your head and it's stressing you out! You need the David Allen GTD book. Or try using flags in outlook, that's how I keep track of outstanding requests.

Does filing mean you never look again? If so, you might as well delete.

There's filing and there's filing--one organisational seminar I went to suggested filing by deadline until the email was fully dealt with, and then filing by whatever your dominant system is.

You can also file things normally but mark them unread so they still stand out as requiring some sort of attention.

I'm telling you, I need to have everything in my head. It's not about what's outstanding, it's about what's already happened. I go to meetings and am expected to be able to report not only on the current status of every single thing, but details of stuff that happened up to a year ago. (I haven't been here a year yet, but that doesn't phase any one.) I can't carry that much paper around.

Perfect example: someone just came in, looking for an answer to a question that's not technically in my area, but I did have a (filed) email from December that told me who the person to ask was.

I did have a (filed) email from December that told me who the person to ask was.

So filing is not a problem, then? I was reading into "If I read the email and file it immediately (even after acting on it), I'll never remember that it got done" more than anything else.

I kept much of my emails because of CYA. There were moves at hand to make sure we didn't keep more than a certain volume or before a certain date, but I need to save that information somewhere. It'd be harder for litigators to find it if I printed it out and stored it at my desk, but the whole point of my job was to promote a paperless desk.

Push comes to shove--if it's harder for me to do my job without it, management has to accept the effect of the purges and not hold me quite as accountable.

What I meant is, I like to go over the email a couple of times before I file it, so it sticks in my brain. Usually I try to go through everything on Fridays, and file things that had been ongoing during the week (but are now done) then.

If emails are action items (and relatively simple ones), touching them once seems plausible. If they're an exchange of information, it seems perfectly reasonable to file or memorise the info, either of which imply further touching unless you're hella good. In ways I've never been.

All this reminds me that I really need to clean out my personal inbox here.

Hands! Hands in new email!

Yeah, I'm bad about that. I should rework how I work.