Today I went through my entire email inbox and cleaned it out. I have a couple important emails I wanted to save, but I narrowed it down to 7. This was out of nearly 7,000 emails! My inbox became a glaring mountain of responsibilities and things calling for my attention. I needed to clean it out. In other words, I needed to take a minimalist perspective on my email usage.
I read this article today from Zen Habits on the concept Email Zen and I realized that I need to have an empty inbox to make room for the things that truly matter. Achieving a mindset of peace and calm is a pretty noble state of mind to aspire for. However, whenever I log into my email account and see all those emails piled up over the years, my calmness is overwhelmed with the past. Do I need to keep all these emails? Keeping them around and clogging up my inbox is just another form of procrastination. So I took action today and emptied it out. Just one more step to a more peaceful daily life.