I had the most productive week this week that I've had in months, which makes me very happy indeed; I'm as poor as always, unfortunately, so can't really go out and celebrate per se, but did decide at least to get out tonight for a couple of drinks and some face-time with the hoo-mons on a Saturday evening. Or, well, first I stopped by a cafe for a couple of hours, where this entry's photo comes from, sitting around reading John Crowley's "The Solitudes" (first book of the trippy "AEgypt" cycle), which is really making my brain hurt at this point and is something I'm praying gets better as it continues. But the cafe closed at 9:00, or about 15 minutes ago; now I'm across the street at Uptown Lounge having a bourbon, then will probably walk back to my neighborhood and have another bourbon at Holiday, then finally to home for the night. Salut! Once again, I can't explain how happy I am over how much I got done this week; here's hoping that all my weeks soon are as productive as this one was.
A stupid question to ask in Chicago, but I'll ask it anyway -- if this is the kind of protection against the elements your bus stops provide, what the fuck is the point of building the bus stops in the first place? I'm just asking!
I'm out running some late errands in the middle of a winter storm; here's the view that greeted me at Lincoln and Montrose, in front of the Sulzer library where I was picking out some movies. I never stop being fascinated by this, that even in such a huge city, you can regularly come across such beautiful, intimate sights as these.
Anyway, I recently read this article by Lifehacker.com's Gina Trapani, where she invents a new simple three-folder system for handling all her email; it got me to thinking about the ways I use email myself, which led to me inventing a three-label system for my own use. As you can see in the above screenshot, they consist of "respond," "moreaction" and "holdtemp" -- basically, if an email is going to be in my inbox from now on, it needs to have at least one of these labels, or else there's no reason for it to be there. Each time a new email comes in, then, the moment I'm done reading it, I'll end up making one of the following decisions:
--I'm done; throw it away
--It requires a short response; do it right that second
--It requires a long response; give it the "respond" label
--It requires another action on my part away from my email, before it can be thrown away; give it the "moreaction" label
--It requires information from someone else before it can be thrown away; give it the "holdtemp" label
--It can be archived; give it one of the usual archiving labels in my system
I'm hoping, then, that this will help me not only speed through the 22 emails still left in my inbox these days (some going all the way back to April of last year, I shit you not), but also to quickly turn around all new email that arrives in the future, and keep me in a situation where I'm keeping on top of my email as much as anything else in my life. That would be a real relief, to tell you the truth; that's one of the biggest sources of stress in my life these days, in fact, is the constant pressure of getting back to old emails in my inbox. Anyway, wish me luck.
