If you’ve ever been to a wealth creation seminar, read a book about it or talked to anyone about real estate, you’ll be familiar with the idea of good debt and bad debt.
Recently, I’ve become aware that there’s also good emptiness and bad emptiness.
Good emptiness is what I’ve managed to achieve with my email inbox. Over the summer break I spent considerable time cleaning and filing the emails filling my Inbox. I was finding that I’d start every day feeling overwhelmed because as soon as I checked my email there was SSSSOOOOO much there.
My approach was fairly brutal; if I haven’t looked at it and it’s been sitting in my Inbox for any length of time then chances were I wasn’t going to read it and so it got ditched. Next was filing things I decided I should hang onto for legal, tax or sentimental reasons. Google Apps are incredibly helpful with this as I could create a set of filters and let it sort it all out for me.
The outcome was I started the new working year with an empty Inbox. Since then, I’ve been very diligent and started each day with an email purge – much of the daily stuff is quickly disposed of. Again Google helps with this by extracting the spam. This requires a quick check to ensure there’s nothing real that has slipped through (it does happen, but very rarely) and deleting sometimes hundreds of messages in a single shot – very satisfying.
The rest is a quick review and response to everything else.
When I finish at the end of the day I make sure there’s nothing left that’s unread.
This has been a very interesting discipline and one of the odd things I noticed is that I was looking at my empty Inbox feeling somehow neglected. When I had a break in the day, I’d go to my Inbox and finding it empty, rather than feeling elated, I’d wonder why nothing new had turned up. Thankfully, I’ve overcome that, and am now delighted to see the box still the same as when I visited it last. This also means I’m spending less time checking it.
That’s the good emptiness.
The bad emptiness is the feeling that comes when I look at our house-sitting bookings for the year. At the moment it’s very sparse. Danita & I have been house-sitting since May 2011. During that time we’ve had very few times with nowhere to go; perhaps a couple of weeks in all. At this stage, however, our calendar is looking scarily empty – just a couple of odd weeks through the year with a one month booking for June-July.
One of the main lessons we’ve learned with house-sitting is developing an attitude of gratitude and a sense of trusting in the Universe. So far those have delivered – so far!!
Stay tuned for our next exciting instalment. Until next time – travel well.