How to do this?

1. Open your email program and create a new folder called “DMZ“
2. Go to your email inbox and Select All (* You might alternatively choose all email older than n days)
3. Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder
4. Go, and sin no more.

A scary proposition, but I must say it has done wonders for my mood today. I moved everything before TODAY into the DMZ. I will qualify this by mentioning that mail from my clients is filtered into their individual project folders, as is mail from Sam and prospects from my site contact form.

Six emails in the inbox...even if I am psyching myself out right now:

And yes, while there are 2,757 emails in the DMZ, that's down from over 3,000 this morning. Having them segregated keeps them from distracting me when I'm in my inbox, but gives me a place to go when I want to weed out junk (or just file stuff) in earnest.

So far, so good. Baby steps rule.

And better yet, I'm on the right track with another modest resolution I made. I've cooked dinner two nights in a row. Not just throwing stuff together or digging stuff out of the freezer - I made a zucchini gratin last night, and a roasted chicken stuffed with lemons tonight. Seriously good stuff, both from Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris - my favorite cookbook from my favorite cookbook author. I have never had a bad recipe from any of her books...And this is very good for things on the old homestead as well...we have found ourselves in restaurants way too many times in the past few weeks.