Zero Bits

When was the last time your email inbox was empty? Totally, completely clear. Mine is right now. In fact, I try to get it to empty every single day. Some days I succeed better than others.

Author Mark Hurst writes about this as bit literacy. See his book of the same name at Amazon. He recommends that we achieve emptiness every day for email. I agree with him.

When the snail mail comes to the house, I don’t put pieces of it aside to deal with later. I open all of it that interests me and recycle the rest. Why not the same with email? Since when have we agreed to email overwhelm? Can we change those agreements?
My sweetie and I signed up for GreenDimes.com a couple of years ago so we could get off all those catalogue mailing lists. Our recycling is three-quarters less than it used to be. In my email program, under Tools, I found an option called Block Sender. It moves emails I’m not interested in immediately to the Deleted folder.

Mr. Durst suggests we empty our inboxes daily so that we have a chance for an empty mind as well. Zero bits. No input. Monkey mind put to bed. Silence. Quiet. The peace of our own thoughts without information overload from others.

Try this: empty your inbox today, and see how long you can keep it empty. I think you’ll find that your mind quiets quite naturally when you deliberately decrease the input you allow.