Tidiness by Susan Grimsdell
Household order
I’m a very tidy person. I put things away after I’ve used them, I never ever leave dishes in the sink, I dry the shower after I’ve used it, and I even do dusting.
I have to confess I’m so extreme that it bothers me even to read about messy things in, say, novels. If the plot has the character spilling something on the floor, many pages later, when the story has moved on, part of me is still worrying – “did he go back and wipe that up?”
Email chaos
So why do I let my computer files get in such a mess? At the moment there are 12,261 emails in my sent folder, 3,674 in “deleted” and I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many are in the inbox, quite a few of them unread according to the computer. Not long ago I spent hours going through the inbox, reading, deleting and filing, but here we are just a couple of weeks later, and the number is again completely out of control. Why is it so hard to deal with these pesky emails?
More to the point, why does it nag away at me? After all, if I’m not going to file them, shouldn’t I just forget about it, don’t give it another moment’s thought? But I can’t. They prey on my mind.
No need for any rules with the brilliant year by year solution
Perfect answer
To my delight, I recently found a brilliant solution. Someone mentioned that what her husband does is never bother about dragging emails to folders or any of that tedious overwhelming stuff. At the end of each year he highlights the tens of thousands of emails in “inbox”, and “sent”, and copies them into a new folder he creates, with the title “2016”, and soon, “2017”. Wow, dealt with in one fell swoop, and they’re still there if he ever does want to find one of them.
Now that’s thinking outside the box! I’ll go with that.
verbalberbal 
I’m with you, except in my case it’s cleaning the bath, but hey ho, the sister-in-law is visiting next weekend, so I’ll have to clean it, and the windows, and the oven, and the inside of the car, and the ……. – oh bugger it, she’s coming to see us – I’ll just have a bath.