Last week I took a few days off. I spent a generous long weekend hiking through the Palatinate Forest and celebrating my birthday. When I started working again this morning, I had to deal with some email that had piled up during my absence.

For most people, handling email is a very unpleasant task. But ever since I adopted the inbox zero principle, I’m rarely stressed about it. After sorting out the important ones, I move the rest into a separate archive folder or even delete them. Then I assign a task to the remaining items requiring action and move them into the same archive folder.

And that’s all there is to it for me. Over the years I’ve developed a very strict routine and today I realised again, how important such a set of rules can be. That’s what I learnt today.