![\"Christiane](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Christiane-Muehmel.jpg\")
<\/a>A guest column by Christiane M\u00fchmel, Raum und Zeit, Ulm<\/p>\nHow do you actually manage your inbox?<\/strong><\/p>\n Are you also a \u201ctower-stacker\u201d (someone who has the knack for piling up papers and documents into extremely tall stacks) or more of a \u201cmulti-stacker\u201d (someone who tends to make many smaller stacks, so that you can only glimpse the desk\u2019s original color in a few spots)?<\/p>\n Where does your mail actually end up? By that I mean all the documents, CDs, magazines, etc., that someone wants to give you\u2014whether it\u2019s your boss, a coworker, or actually the mail service. <\/p>\n It sounds trivial, but simply setting up a real \u201cinbox\u201d\u2014in the form of a tray with a clear label\u2014often works wonders. If you also coordinate this with all your \u201cmail carriers,\u201d you can prevent having to search for new mail in all sorts of unlikely places (e.g., on the keyboard, right on the chair, under the table, etc.) in the future. <\/p>\n After all, you\u2019ve surely installed a mailbox at home for your mail carrier\u2014or would you find it more exciting to search for letters every day under the doormat, in the yard, or behind the rain gutter?<\/p>\n We often do something similar when sorting through incoming mail at the office. And what\u2019s even worse, we handle our incoming mail in a very strange way: Do you do that at home, too? For example, if you don’t want to pay a bill, do you put it back in the mailbox? Of course not! So why do we often make life so difficult for ourselves at work? <\/p>\n So:<\/p>\n Christiane M\u00fchmel<\/p>\n Space and Time<\/p>\n Phone: 0731-380 56 67<\/p>\n mail@raum-u-zeit.de<\/a><\/p>\n www.raum-u-zeit.de<\/a> or<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nFor example, we take various documents from the stack\u2014but anything that doesn\u2019t interest us at the moment, anything we don\u2019t want to make a decision about, and anything we don\u2019t have time for, we simply put right back! At best, we put them on a new stack; at worst, we put them back with the \u201cunreviewed documents.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
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