And now it seems that it is being a violent spring.

It's difficult to tell what weather is happening next. I just finished writing another blog post while sitting in my basement waiting for the tornado sirens to stop. Ordinarily, we Midwesterners take tornadoes rather lightly. However, having had several towns in Missouri and Oklahoma crushed by this brief, but vicious, force of nature in the last couple of days, I'm not taking any chances. So that put me in the basement. Alongside me was my ancient chihuahua, annoyed by the abrupt halt in his latest attempts to stare me into feeding him. Again. With us was also my neurotic rat terrier, more than happy to go to the basement and bury herself as far under a pile of dirty clothes as she could get. It would be a shorter list to create of the things Molly isn't afraid of than what she is afraid of. I didn't have the fortune of meeting her until she was an abandoned one year old, so I have to assume she did not have a happy puppyhood. That buys her a lot of leniency.

So in this brief wait for the violent weather to pass, I thought I would catch up on some writing. It's been awhile, and a lot has happened. I changed jobs and now spend an inordinate amount of time commuting. What was a ten minute walk is now an hour drive. I have to be there at 8 in the morning, where I used to arrive at 10…when I was running early. I guess I'm trying to say that it has been an adjustment. But, the pay is good and I love the work. Maybe my next gig will be in bicycling distance. I can hope!

Ok, enough rambling!

I've noticed over the years that I can spend a lot of my day just handling email. Not just reading it and organizing it, but acting on it, too. My guess is that you or someone near and dear to you does, too.

How to deal with it? Give email it's original definition of asynchronous communication! That is two big words meaning you don't have to answer it immediately! Download an alarm/timer, like Toggl, and commit a specific amount of time to getting through the inbox.

Make a quick deletion of anything in your list that looks like spam. Dont even open it, just hit delete. Next, a brief perusal of the list to see if there is anything very important. This would be emails from people, not listservs, that might be waiting for an answer. Read and answer those. If the answer will take some work, mark the email as an action item to be dealt with after email. When you are done with an email, file it or delete it but don't leave it in your inbox, UNLESS it is an action item and those will be marked as such.

Check your informational listserv emails next. See something that looks interesting? Bookmark it and read it after you are done with email. Bookmarks can be organized into folders, so create a folder called "Action," and put the day's reading in it. Once you've cleared through these, delete them, you've already recorded the links in them.

The alarm goes off and you are done! By finishing up the active emails first, anything can wait if you run out of time. Close up shop and get on with your day. Believe me, they will be there tomorrow. If you have a high level of email, you can set aside an AM and a PM time, but don't go over! There aren't many rewards for spending your life reading email.