Hello and welcome to best laid plans.

This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk all things planning

and planning adjacent.

Today I have for you an August Q&A episode, and I am very grateful for you listeners who have sent me your questions,

because at this particular juncture in Quintile No. 4, in which I've just finished a call week,

and have still not cut up from vacation, and had a lot of big projects kind of coming to you all at once,

I do not think I could have put together

a coherent episode without the submissions of you listeners and readers. So thank you so much

for sending these in because I think there are some juicy and fun questions we'll be able

to get to today. That is your reminder. You can always send me more. I may not get to them

right away, but I will always respond.

So without further ado, I'm going to move on to our questions. And I'm actually going to start with a,

I don't want to call it planner piece submission, but maybe technique piece submission that comes

from a listener named Kate. All right, here comes her email. and it just made me so happy to hear her success,

and I hope maybe it inspires someone else listening. So Kate entitled her email, Inbox Zero,

and Kate writes, I just wanted to say a quick thanks for the push on Inbox Zero in one of your

recent BLP episodes. I've really appreciated the piece that inbox zero brings to my work

life over the past few years. But this spring, I was teaching a really heavy load. I'm a

university professor, and I got really behind. And then as soon as the semester ended, I left my

husband and kids at home to go on a two-week trip to Spain to walk the Camino. And the email

behind us has only gotten worse.

Fast forward to now, and with 500 mostly unread messages in my inbox, I used your start at the

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