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.

I have 302 messages in my inbox. I have a couple thousand in the one dedicated to support. And a database that contains every question asked since...well, I'm not sure. 1995, at minimum. Indexed and filed and... I still have a couple thousand emails in that box. Cause sometimes it's easier to recall Dec 3 2003 and look up that day than try to find that email buried in a 15 page log.

I need to know where to look. I also need my head filled with bits of arcana. Some of that arcana is knowing where to look. It's not a very transportable set of crap.

"Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and I Need It Bad”

This? Is priceless.

Well, I just cleared hundreds of emails out of my personal email inbox. Anything that's in my inbox that's more than a month or so old lives on because of silly sentimentalism. I refuse to give in sufficiently to make a folder just for that, so there they stay.

It's one thing to have a working knowledge of a project-- my job is having encyclopedic knowledge about case facts. But the reason why I recommend the Getting Things Done book is because of one experience I had with it-- he suggests getting out a piece of paper and writing down every single outstanding task you have, personal or professional, short or long term, just everything where you think "I need to remember to do that." The night I did that my brain completely cleared. It was amazing and energizing. I felt like a fog of vague stress had lifted.

I'm admittedly a slacker at keeping up with writing down all my tasks and next actions and whatnot, but I am a believer in how clarifying it can be to have that done.

I also have all my emails filed by project and I review everything sent and received over the past week on Monday nights. I just wish outlook worked as well as gmail at indexing so it wasn't such a pain in the ass to search for.