Another Advantage of a Zero Inbox

I'm now increasingly checking my email from a mobile device, and having an empty inbox is very handy in this case: the built-in email client doesn't thread messages like gmail does, so even having only one conversation in your current inbox can already mean that you've got several screenfuls of emails cluttering up everything.

With your Zero Inbox (or was it 'Inbox Zero'?), if something crops up it is immediately visible as new, and in a nice case of a positive feedback loop you will want to deal with it quickly to get back to that pristine empty inbox.

And of course you have the satisfying blank page when there is no actual mail waiting for you...

Streaks

I got a new toy, which pretends to be a mobile phone but instead really runs lots of applications on it. One of them, which I installed today, is called Streaks. This is exactly what I need to keep up my writing: you get a little calendar, and tap a date (has to be in the past...). The program then puts a satisfying red X on the day, and counts how many days your current streak is. It maintains counts for the current streak and the longest. Ideally, of course, you will only have one streak!

For my own writing chain I only count work-days, so there'll be a bit of a break over the upcoming Easter hols. However, I can't tell that to the program, so I'll mark weekends and holidays as 'streaked'. The first consequence is that my 34 current links got puffed up to a massive 46, which is of course nice... And it makes it even harder to stop.

Today I was a bit stuck for what to write, and so I started a new project, one that I wanted to have started earlier anyway. With new projects it's a lot easier to write stuff, and if you do it during the mindless "have to write 200 words" stage of the day it saves you your more productive time to do the real work. At least that's the theory!