Declaring email bankruptcy?

Screenshot of this morning's mailbox, letter-slot view. Click to enlarge.

With 1,312 messages in my Inbox, 726 of them unread, I'm contemplating following the path of the illustrious Lawrence Lessig and declaring 'email bankruptcy'.

At approximately 200 inbound messages a day, it's a chore to keep one's eyes above water, let alone one's nose, and my toes long ago stopped touching bottom.

But I'm gonna give it one more massive try -- this weekend -- and see if I can catch up without actually declaring.

Meanwhile, those neatniks who could never understand my desk/filing system can get some insight from a newly-published book -- "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place" -- about which Booklist has the following to say:

From Booklist
Flying utterly in the face of conventional wisdom, the authors turn the world of organization on its head to examine how messy systems can be more effective than highly organized ones. Neatness for its own sake, they say, not only has hidden costs in terms of man-hours that could be spent doing other work but it turns out that the highly touted advantages may not even exist. More loosely defined, moderately disorganized people and businesses seem to be more efficient, more robust, and more creative than the obsessively neat. As examples, the authors cite a hardware store crammed to the gills with every sort of product in seemingly disorganized fashion that does twice the business of the "neat" one down the block; a grade school where the students are allowed random access to learning materials with no structured lessons, and no discipline problems; and the seemingly chaotic life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who refuses to make appointments and sees everyone on the fly. The chronically messy will revel in the anecdotes but may need to skip the terminology. David Siegfried

-- Dan Damon

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