I delete a text conversation as soon as I’m finished with it, unless there is something specifically in it that I need to reference later on. I also clear my “called” lists periodically.
When I mean inbox zero, I don’t mean deleting all emails - I mean having them filed away in folders, so that the inbox itself is zero (or near zero). I can’t really maintain zero, but I can keep it at less than 20 at any time, which is close enough for my purposes!
I have no clutter at all in the visible parts of my home. Counters and flat surfaces are either completely clear or well-curated, and cabinets and drawers in most rooms are well-organized. (I do have a few closets that are a mess, though.) I recently downsized dramatically and had to get rid of a LOT of my stuff to have my new, much smaller house in a clutter-free state.
It stops at the house for me, though. My garage is a disaster, my office at work is a mess, and so is my car. True confession: I treat the trunk of my car as a mobile storage unit for everything I can’t figure out to do with in my house.
My email in-boxes are overflowing, and it would never occur to me to delete texts. I’m not even sure I knew they could be deleted.
I’m a slob at heart but my mood is so affected by clutter that I make a huge effort to contain it at home.
Will it surprise anyone to learn that I have 21,355 unread emails in my Inbox? Didn’t think so. I have scanned the titles and senders, of course, just not opened the emails.
How can you keep up with anything if you don’t open your emails? For all you know, you have students or colleagues who are trying to contact you. And if you see something is clearly spam, why not just delete it? I think you could probably benefit from the “touch it once” philosophy that Mother2Dragons referenced upthread 
No doubt about the “touch it once” philosophy, PG.
On the other hand, if my students are sending me emails under pseudonyms with subjects that have nothing to do with their courses, then I am not opening them. Ditto for my colleagues. If they want to use a subject line “QuantMech, don’t miss this great discount on an ocean cruise to Paraguay,” and they use a false mailing name, well, then . . .
Most of the unread email would be spam to you, but to me it is a rich source of not-yet-taken opportunities for a discount on self-publishing, those slip covers I have been meaning to order, mail-order bird seed, and decluttering books!
You clearly are a P in Myers-Briggs! Always leaving the door open …
But you don’t actually buy decluttering books. You either sit at B&N and skim them, or you get them from the library
Re work email: I’ve tried various methods of filing my emails and I finally discovered that, for me, treating my email as a single large chron file that is archived at regular intervals is most effective.
I do forward case and project-specific emails to my assistant for filing in the specific electronic correspondence files associated with the particular case or project, but I also keep a copy of the forwarded emails in my in-box / archived chron file. And attachments are obviously filed by my assistant in the appropriate places, generally electronically.
Only spam or truly personal stuff gets deleted (and I block spammers immediately and NEVER use my work email on commercial sites, so spam at work is fairly manageable). I’m able to retrieve what I need quickly with this method, but it does mean that at any given time my in-box and sent-items folders have 1000s of emails in them.
In my personal email, I rarely bother to delete spam (although I do unsubscribe to most of it) and I have lots of unread email. i have VIP alerts set up for certain people but otherwise I just rely on quickly scanning new emails several times a day. This method works for me. I often find myself searching for old emails that I would likely have deleted if I had a more rigorous system.
So having a lot of email in the in-box is not necessarily a sign of disorganization.
I agree that with search capabilities (such as in gmail) you can easily find stuff without having to file it. Again, it must be the visual part in me – it’s “relaxing” (for lack of a better term) to have an inbox with only a few things in it, and know that everything is tucked away in a relevant folder.
I bought a really big tote bag for the summer, though, and it’s a mess since I’ve thrown lots of stuff in there, if it makes you all feel better
Purse mess… No more! My vintage Chanel WOC is the best purse ever. It is what it is - a large wallet on a sturdy chain.
I like to keep my office clean. Papers are filed away in folders. No personal knickknacks of any kind (been through a couple of layoffs, so no, I do not want to spend my last hour in the office frantically collecting personal possessions). Emails get deleted or filed by project/subproject.
Hate food messes, so I pre-chop everything into bowls, clean up the messes, and then cook TV show-style.
My car… a mess. It is a good thing that I officially do not have one anymore!
My kitchen counters…I clean them every day and S2 and DH reclutter them within minutes. Permanent residents on the counters: undercounter toaster oven and radio/CD, bread box, knife block, landline phone, basket of all my meds, stack of my paperwork, TV. Counter next to stove and sink: dog treat container (cute and color-coordinated), container of utensils, mini food processor, dish soap and hand soap containers. Canisters, olive oil, pasta container on shelf above the sink. I recently moved the DVD player downstairs, got rid of a second utensil container and moved a lot of my stuff upstairs. The kitchen isn’t big and I have two serious cooks, so short of remodeling, I think it will always be cluttered because there isn’t more storage space. S2 has five boxes of kitchen gear in the basement.
OMG, DH wants to keep all the soy sauce and duck sauce packages, plastic utensils, restaurant napkins, etc. I toss them when he’s on the road.
I am big on clean-as-you-go when cooking. DH and S2 aren’t. They always wonder how the kitchen is clean when the food hits the table.
Here’s where I am cluttered-my makeup drawer. It’s like I can’t throw anything away. I have an organized makeup tray on the counter that looks tidy and only holds my “everyday-ish” makeup, but the drawer below it-hooooo. It’s like Sephora vomited, fell in its own rainbow-colored vomit, and died in that drawer.
My digital photos are also hopelessly cluttered. I have so many folders. I’m waiting for somebody to invent something that will take them all and organize them for me. Existing programs aren’t good enough yet, I’ve found.
Cars are super clean. I have an entire detailing shelf in the garage dedicated to cleaning the cars. It’s my cardio-I have a “car wash” playlist I created that takes about three hours, and I wash and wax the cars inside and out (each car takes about three hours, mine I do all the time, H’s I do every now and then, the girls car very seldom). We keep our cars a long time, so the longer I can be happy with it, the longer I keep it. If it looks, feels, and drives like practically new we have no incentive to trade them in.
H has thousands of unread emails in his personal email account. I’m boggled by it, but it works for him. I groom mine ruthlessly. Texts all stay, though, unless they’re spam.
I am not good at clean as you go cooking. The kitchen looks like a bomb went off in it when I’m done.
PG, I think the comment “you don’t actually buy decluttering books” is a prescription, rather than a fact. I own a very large selection of decluttering books. I would estimate that I have at least 14 of them. (Again, no joke.)
Did you actually read them? Implement at least one suggestion, clear out at least one trouble spot, think of a strategy for avoiding a trouble spot, etc? Did any of them inspire you to think differently?
And if you read and didn’t implement the ideas in the first book, what made you go get a second, third, fourth, etc?
Are there any areas where you are particularly organized/clutter-free? I don’t know the nature of what you do, but I assume science labs have to be run with exacting protocol, things put away properly, etc. And I assume you have to have some structure to how you grade students?
"…but I assume science labs have to be run with exacting protocol, things put away properly, etc. "
I worked with a brilliant chemist who could purify snowy white crystals out of tarry, browncrapcolored reaction mixtures. His products were of high purity. But his hood and bench space were a complete mess!!! I cannot even describe how nasty they looked. So… some science labs are like landfills. It is amazing that groundbreaking research happens in them.
The decluttering books vary in their inspirational potential. Most of them were of some help, just incomplete. At some point, I will try to locate the ones that I found best. The Kondo books did not inspire any life-changing magic for me, I have to say. They are too minimalist.
At work, I follow safety requirements stringently. The university has excellent people in charge of safety in various domains. I don’t think there are any labs that look like “landfills” in the building, though some of my colleagues are better than others about that.
I am well organized with regard to intellectual work. My classes are quite structured. Though I am often late to meetings (to be honest), I have been late to only 3 classes in 30+ years (by which I mean 3 lectures out of the total, and not "I was always late to Quantum Mechanics 101, so that’s 1 class), and never by more than 5 minutes.
“I don’t think there are any labs that look like “landfills” in the building…”
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In my career of a synthetic organic chemist, I have seen it all, from neat freaks to complete slobs. Chemistry is not that far from cooking - it involves mixing things, boiling things, crushing chunks of solid into powders, etc. It also requires washing dishes!
I totally get keeping books you find useful or enjoy. But if a particular decluttering book was of no / limited value, what prompts you to put it back on your shelf versus donating it or throwing it out? IOW, even when you’ve just read about getting rid of something useless to you, what makes you avoid doing so with that very book?
Is the stuff you keep in good order, or do you keep broken things too? (I don’t mean those that you are in the midst of fixing - I mean old things that aren’t repairable or not worth it.)
Get decluttering tips online.
Most of the books are full of filler. If they were “decluttered,” they’d be pamphlets. Not even a good bathtub read.
My weakness is my old cookbooks. I don’t usually buy them now. And I solved part of the magazine problem by cancelling subscriptions and just buying the annual. But I love to cook and wish I had space to have more of them near the kitchen. But small kitchen and no wall space for a shelf.
QM, this is fascinating. Seriously :-). Because you are a very smart cookie!
Do you have structured systems for things like paying your bills? Do you have household files for things like warranties, passports, tax-related papers? I guess I’m trying to ask - is what you are describing organized (but you like things visible and out) or disorganized (things get lost, you don’t know where they are, wind up buying something you already own, etc).
Oh, yes, to the pamphlet comment about decluttering books!