Sarah Auerswald, The Mar Vista Mom In Her Vlogging Debut from Sarah Auerswald on Vimeo.

It’s been about 2 months since Caroline Donahue came and brought her Remabulous self over to my office to do productivity bootcamp on my butt and I thought I’d take a little look back at my progress. I have to start by saying, my desk is still a mess.

But somehow it works for me.

When I called Caroline I was drowning in emails and it’s not like the tide has slowed, but it’s more of an attitude shift on my part and a few new strategies Caroline gave me. First of all, she reset the time interval when my email gets downloaded onto my computer; instead of instantly, it only shows up every 30 minutes. Of course she wants me to reset that interval to once an hour, but I’ve taken baby steps. Because of course beyond that, there’s turning the darn thing off all together, but that’s just crazy talk. So I have learned to live with 30 minutes.

Next, I sort them as they come in — if it doesn’t fit in a category it goes in the trash. And Caroline’s rule was to set a time to check emails, and during that time, answer ones that can be done in 2 minutes or less and file the rest away. Then you have to have time planned to go through those files, but we assume that you will. Or that I will. Which I have most days.

And the result: an empty inbox. Yes, it even drew hatred on Twitter this week, but I can live with that kind of hatred, because I have an empty inbox for the 2nd time this week.

In front of the The Curious Palate: Parked at Target — someone who’s clearly really good at passing things on:

I’m a sucker for anybody giving free things to people who need them, and the Got Milk people are giving money to hungry families for every “virtual’ gallon of milk passed on their facebook page. They even made a video with some very famous people, including yours truly *ahem*, passing some ceremonial milk. Have a look and then please consider clicking over and helping them give more to Feeding America.