Well, I’ve just spent the better part of two hours cleaning and sorting out my inbox, and I’ve finally dodged email bankruptcy once again.

Whew.

“Email bankcruptcy” is that term that was coined by Laurence Lessig, where you basically throw your hands in the air, and delete your entire inbox — then send out a mass email apologizing profusely for not answering everyone because … well, you’ve declared bankruptcy in your inbox. And then ask for a resend.

I did have an epiphany of sorts while I was doing it.

Not the kind where I had a hallelujah chorus or anything like that, but a quiet one while I was tagging, deleting, archiving, and *cursing* how gmail won’t allow you to sort by sender.

Yep, I realized that email bankruptcy — for me, anyway — is all about procrastination.

The desire to want to put things off.

The inexplicable urge to NOT want to make a decision about something.

Combine it with being a pack rat about … well, pretty much everything in life, and its a situation that’s rife for organizational disaster. And I think whether its a giant stack of papers on my desk, or a giant stack of virtual papers in my virtual inbox, its pretty much all the same.

I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done a few times. If organizational issues are a pain for you, there are tons of great resources, and you should think about reading it yourself.

But one of the biggest things I got out of it was, no matter how you actually organize things, how important it is to *have* a system and how you have to be ruthless about being regular when you commit to it.

There’s no great science to it, but for me, I basically try and decide that when Stuff Comes In, I sort it, do something about it, or throw it out. And if you have no plans on doing something about it? Throw it out.

And for me, the biggest stumbling block is that “do something about it” metaphorical folder. Because its the NOT doing stuff — and not making decisions — that is natural as a life-long procrastinator.

I don’t have any great revelations over exactly what I will be doing in the future to stave off email bankruptcy, save trying to implement some small, but consistent, changes in my behaviour. And trying to reaffirm the idea about making small decisions with email, as in life, is the right thing to do. And that the familiar kind of “its not a big deal — I’ll deal with it later” type thinking is a kind of false thinking, and an invalid cognition, that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.

Meh … big words, but we’ll see how it goes in a week’s time. ;)