Zero. That’s the number of e-mails I have stored in my in-box at the moment. I try to keep it under five. I only store work that I need to get done today in my in-box. The rest follows the 4 D’s — do, delete (my favorite), delegate (a close second), and drag. “Drag” can also mean “file” — but that doesn’t start with a “D.” I cheat a little — I’ve set up “rules” for most of my e-mails from service providers and others outside of the company. These e-mails get tucked away in a reading folder until I have time to scan them. One arrived the other day about the new UK Anti-corruption Law. If you haven’t read about this, and your company does business in the United Kingdom, you need to take a look.

I bet you’ve taken a bunch of time management courses like I have. I fumbled around with various time management approaches — finally discovering a helpful book, Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized by Sally McGhee. Finally — something that uses something we all probably have at work. Do yourself a favor. Get it. Read it. Live it. (OK — so that might be a tad melodramatic).
 
I wanted to thank you all for your warm wishes and kind comments on my first blog. A couple of you mentioned that you’d like to know a little more about my background. I now lead the Corporate Audit department at Delta Air Lines and provide assurance over enterprise risk management practices. I joined Delta in March 2009 to form an internal audit team based in Atlanta after Delta’s merger with Northwest Airlines. I’m very proud of the team I’ve built here at Delta. They are a diverse and highly skilled group of auditors with a sense of adventure and intellectual curiosity. We continue to receive support from our co-sourced service provider as well.
 
Prior to Delta, I led the internal audit team at Starbucks Coffee Company. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to form Starbucks first internal audit function (by the way: no apostrophe on Starbucks, even when possessive). I left a great team behind in Seattle, and I’m sure they will continue to do amazing things. Life before that included planning and accounting roles at Taco Bell and eight years at Price Waterhouse (beforethetwonameswereruntogetherwithaCoopersstuckattheend). My husband is a small business owner, and we have two kids who are part of the net generation (or N-Geners). They can study with their iPods blasting in their headphones while texting their friends and playing video games with the TV on. We have two large breed dogs (one is a puppy) and a gargantuan cat. I do believe that our family holds an undocumented world record for the most amount of laundry ever created by a family of four — and we repeat this record-breaking feat each week. 
 
That’s it for now. I’ll be blogging from high in the sky next weekend — somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on my trip back from Europe. I don’t know how we lived without Wi-Fi onboard. Have a great week, everyone … keep your in-box clean.