Two quick things:  I wrote a piece for Mom.me last week called "What Are We Going To Do With All These Men?" about the women out there who are the lone females in famlies of men. And today I have a new piece on Fast Company today called "What I Gained When I Threw In The Towel On Family Dinner."

So on the subject of writing/business, I want to tell you how to get that "inbox zero" feel without actually having to achieve inbox zero. It's nice, it's like cleaning up one room of the house and feeling good about that even while the rest of the house is a mess.

Basically I have a fake secret inbox. I set it up many years ago when I was concerned that emails from my inbox were getting accidentally deleted, so I set up a subfolder titled "AInbox" (so it stays at the top of my sub-folders). Anytime I get a new email that I plan on handling later, I just move it to this "Fake Inbox" folder. That's where everything that's not urgent or needs some new information or have to save as a reference for the near future goes. This way, it's not taunting me every time I open my mail. The inbox then gets reserved for things that will get addressed right away, either replied to, deleted, or sorted.

So, try it, if you hate opening your mail and feeling like you're always behind but the actual business of replying to all the emails just isn't feasible at this time.