Hello and welcome to Best Laid Plans.

This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk all things planning

and planning adjacent.

Today we're going to try something different.

I am going to include a paper planner review in this

episode. That's not the something different, but I am going to do a little task management email

clean out demo. This is not something I've tried before, but I get a lot of questions about

task capture and I talk about airtight task management in my book. So I thought,

you know, it would be interesting to time myself clearing out my various inboxes and talking to

you guys kind of in real time about where various tasks went within my system. So I am going to

go ahead and kind of do this piecewise. My editors are going to have a little bit more

of a job than they usually do with this podcast because we're going to be putting tracks together

while I take breaks and do some of these things. But I will report back with the amounts of time

that everything takes and maybe it'll give you a little bit of info for your own inbox sorting

as well and ideas for

making sure that all those tasks coming at you get captured somewhere trusted. So the first step

I'm going to do is I'm going to deal with my Gmail inbox. We're not going to do all of my

inboxes today, but we're going to do a few of them. And my Gmail inbox is my most, I don't know, cumbersome, the one where I get all the stuff through the podcast, you guys email me questions, the kids' school stuff comes in there, random bills to pay and things like that come in there. And I do tend to clean it out every week or two. When it gets to be more than two weeks,

it is a little bit of a disaster. So I really try to stick to every week or two. And I'm actually

in a pretty good place right now because real time here. Let's check my inbox. We have

exactly 135 messages in my primary folder. We have, I don't know, a million in my 570 in my

promotions folder. I'll talk about how I deal with that in a minute. I have a social folder

...