I watched the Google Tech Talk given by Merlin Mann of 43 folders on "Inbox Zero". Inspired by the talk, I finally cleaned out my inbox. Actually, it was a bit easier because I've tried a couple of times this month to clear out everything that came in July, so there were only 30 or so messages to deal with, but this time I officially created a DMZ tag and moved everything prior to July there (1165 messages, including 162 unread — thank god for gmail's new "select all" feature). I almost didn't make it because I fell down the trap of starting to do something an email message reminded me off, but caught myself in the middle when I realized it was going to take at least half an hour and made myself a note to finish it later instead.

It's really weird to see Google tell me "No new mail!", since I don't remember seeing that message in a long time. But it makes it a lot easier to remind myself to actually deal with email rather than leaving it in my mailbox, since it's much more manageable to deal with 1-5 messages than to look at a huge big inbox. It also makes email checking a less rewarding distraction, since when I get no new mail (it happens sometimes!), I see an empty inbox, rather than 1100 messages that I could be doing something about. I've done this once before, though, and it devolved back to a full inbox, so I'll report back in a couple of weeks how it's going this time.

We made a todo list for the weekend and have made remarkable progress on it. I think usually we're over-optimistic and end up less than halfway through our list by the time our weekend is over, but perhaps we've started to learn. Our list for yesterday:

• Farmer's market with Soba
• Give Soba flea & tick meds
• Lunch at J's
• Install sink (N) (halfway done)
• Put together filing cabinet (N)
• Put together IKEA desk
• Buy salmon
• Buy letter files & Soba food (L)
• Plank-grill Salmon (L)
• Water front lawn (N)
• Make travel plans for August
• File (L) (halfway done)

Our list for today was less ambitious, with lots of time allocated for work on my proposal. Unfortunately, the unfinished sink installation is likely to eat up a good chunk of that time, but it will be nice to have running water in the kitchen again. Plus I managed to sneak in an hour of work yesterday, so that's progress.