Dang it, totally forgot to post yesterday! I ruined my NaBloPoMo streak. Oh well…
I spent 2.5 hours Sunday morning cleaning out my email which had somehow ballooned to a total of 1,100 emails. Ugh. My personal email has been more and more of a problem lately.
I don’t really like deleting things on my phone, so I tend to use my phone just for “triage” purposes (catching anything urgent). I tend to kind of gloss over things that don’t need immediate attention. The plan is to process those things later, when I have more time and am not on my phone.
Except then “later” doesn’t always come for… weeks. And then I end up with 1,100 emails needing sorting, deleting and in many cases, some sort of attention.
Back when I could access my Gmail on my work computer, I used to use little snippets of time before a meeting, etc to quickly delete or process emails. I wish I could still do that!!
Anyway, I was super happy to get to INBOX ZERO yesterday! Feels so good. I also read a bunch of newsletters, added the entire swim season practices/meets/volunteer shifts to my calendar, added money to lunch accounts, responded to some messages, completed some other tasks and of course deleted a ton of junk.
On another note, I was in a group chat this morning talking about sleep and amounts of deep sleep we are all getting… it got me looking at my sleep data from my Apple Watch.
This is data for the last 6 months, minus August when we went to Florida and my watch died and then I failed to charge it for like, a month afterwards. 😄
Yikes. Average time asleep 6 hr 3 min?! My typical “bedtime” is 10:30 and my typical “alarm” time is 5:15 am so I guess that’s only 6 hours and 45 minutes… then discount time when I don’t sleep well or days I get to bed later than usual… so I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.
But I guess maybe this explains why I’m tired a lot of the time. 😬
Maybe my goal for 2026 needs to be to prioritize sleep a little better. I know it impacts overall health in so many ways (mental health included!).
(Also, 39 min of deep sleep seems a little weak… what’s yours?! I’m not sure what’s “recommended”.)
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful that Asher successfully completed his final (of 6) behind-the-wheel driving sessions tonight (with an instructor). Next up, drivers test in a few short weeks!
GRATEFUL KAE 
Well you know my deep sleep (according to my Oura ring at least) is HORRIFIC. So I am coming back to the comment section to see what other people are getting.
I think my average sleep over 6 months is 7.3 hours. Like Laura V, I feel like I almost always end up at the same place year after year. Some nights I get like 9, and then others I get 4. Welcome to the world of perimenopause?? But it does seem to even out over time to that average.
I think I have always had fairly high sleep needs; in university I almost always was getting 8.5 hours/night!
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I think I had a similar amount of deep sleep when I used my Apple Watch data. Now with the Oura it’s about an hour each night. My therapist said she would not focus on it too much as the only accurate way to measure deep sleep is with an EKG or something like that? My total sleep is the problem right now. I’m often getting 5-5.5 hours which is not nearly enough for me. I am a 7-7.5 hours person. But until I’m off pred or at least not taking an evening dose, I’m accepting that this is just how I will feel for a while. But some days I almost feel dizzy from exhaustion!
I miss having Gmail at work, too. It’s been about 8 years. I nearly exclusively use my phone for email. Occasionally I will use Phil’s laptop to work on a longer email but that’s rare. I do not have inbox zero but I don’t have open tasks in Gmail. If something needs to be addressed, I keep it as unread until I have time to deal with it. I’m a person who cannot have any of those red circle notifications on her aps so that forces me to deal with things faster so I can get rid of the red circles.
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I’m afraid to actually track my sleep data. I know it won’t be good- so actually I probably should track it, and the results would scare me into action. My husband tracks his, and his deep sleep is equally low. But I wonder how accurate that is???
Inbox zero is a pie in the sky goal for me… let’s just say I have more than 1,100 emails. Nice job doing yours though- that must feel amazing.
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I know exactly what you mean when you said that you were super happy to get to INBOX ZERO yesterday, Kae.
I sleep between 7 hours and 8 hours on average in the past 6 month. Although, I’ve never measured the time I spent in N3 sleep or deep sleep.
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I know exactly what you mean when you said that you were super happy to get to INBOX ZERO yesterday, Kae.
I sleep between 7 hours and 8 hours on average in the past 6 month. Although, I’ve never measured the time I spent in N3 sleep or deep sleep.
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I found that wearing a sleep tracker made my sleep a whole lot worse.
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I think I asked this on someone else’s post recently, but when do you charge your watch if you wear it to sleep? I always need to charge it by bedtime and then I let it charge all night.
Now, of course, I have my sleep apnea machine to track my (lack of) sleep, but it has different metrics. I might find knowing all the nitty gritty details pretty depressing.
INBOX ZERO!!! That is an achievement. I am so terrible about inbox hygiene, Kae. It’s out of control right now. Yup. I have 1,095 unread emails. YIKES.
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I charge mine whenever I shower during the day, and it lasts long enough to make it through the night to the next shower time. I have one of the fast chargers, so it typically takes less than an hour for a full charge.
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I’m the exact same way with my email on my phone v. computer. And there’s always so much to do when I finally sit down to clear it up. Samesies with swim (dive) season and lunch accounts, too 🙂 I agree with Jenny– I can’t track my sleep data that was because it would for sure stress me out.
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I do not do my work email on my phone. Out of a principal. There is nothing, absolutely nothing urgent in the world language world that needs my attention after hours. If it is urgent then my principal/supervisor will get in touch with me. Otherwise, if I see an email from a parent complaining about my grading or whatever- I don’t wanna see that. No thanks. So I stay blissfully unaware till the next day when I open the email on my work computer.
sleep… I do feel tired but I am in bed by 8pm. I then read for maybe 40 minutes and lights out. I am up at around 5:30 to give myself that buffer of quiet time. But my golden hour is pretty much gone. I am just too tired to wake that early.
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I do not have access to my work email on my phone (you only get that if you have a government phone, which I don’t) and I am absolutely ok with that.
Re: personal email, I am the opposite. I think I often “weed out” emails immediately that I know I do not need to look at (like store subscriptions, etc. I should probably unsubscribe to a few of those things, too.) and then only look at email that does need attention on my laptop. Are you using any filters? I feel like that helps too.
According to my Sleep Cycle App, I average 7 hours, 12 minutes and it still does not feel enough. and sleep quality is “only” 77%. It’s a constant battle to try to improve that. Luckily, I usually don’t wake up during the night. That’s a win.
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I haven’t been wearing my watch lately so I need to get back in the habit, especially wearing it to bed. When I was tracking my sleep, I think I was averaging around 6.5 hours. Definitely not enough! And my deep sleep was always pretty low. From the light Googling I’ve done, it’s recommended to get 1-2 hours of deep sleep a night. I am definitely nowhere near there, although I do sleep a lot more deeply when I wear my CPAP mask.
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This is interesting. I aim for 7-8 hours per night. My average this week is 7 hours 34 min. Fitbit tells me I wake up between 1.5 hours and 2 hours a night, so I have to go to bed earlier and wake up later because of that.
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