I’m sitting here early on Sunday morning, with a chocolate peppermint pecan pie baking in the oven for our usual Christmas dinner at the Drakes (this year, we’ll be bringing our menorah over to light the first candle of Chanukah, too).

Jeff’s up, so I’ve already lost custody of the paper, though I hope to retrieve it before we go to the JCC to work out (wonder if they’ll have turned off the music, since it’s almost certainly going to have a high Christmas content). With nothing handy to read, I turned to the computer and got caught up on my Gmail and RSS feeds (boy, does that ever feel good!), and discovered from Hal that today is Newtonmas, too.

I wish I’d known that yesterday, while we were talking to the people moving in to Diane’s dad’s house. I knew that they were Palestinian, but I didn’t know if they were Christian, Muslim, or something else, and so, as we were finishing our conversation, I ended with “Happy Holiday,” to which she replied “Tomorrow isn’t a holiday for us, but Happy Chanukah to you”. I felt awkward, and said, “well, enjoy New Year’s”. If only I could have wished her a Happy Newtonmas!

Even if they did celebrate Christmas, I’m sure she would be busy cleaning the house today anyway — they’re moving in on the 29th, and there’s 50 years of stuff in the house for them to go through. She’s putting anything which seems like it requires a decision in a storage area in the attic; we’ve told her it’s OK to do anything she wants with the furniture, but there’s still a ton (probably literally) of papers in various places in the house. I’m not sure when Diane or her brother will be able to make a trip to Valley Stream and sort, but I’m sure it’s going to be a busy trip when it happens.

One of the books which made an impression on me this year was David Allen‘s Getting Things Done.

I can’t say that I’ve completely internalized the GTD system, but a lot of it makes sense. One item which resonates very strongly with me is the need to keep one’s inbox clear — rather than reading a piece of mail, then leaving it in the inbox, it’s better to move it to an “actions pending” file if it can’t be dealt with immediately. That way, the inbox is “new news”, and you don’t have to keep touching old stuff over and over again.

But even though having a clear inbox is a goal, it’s also very difficult for me to do. And once I fall off the wagon, so to speak, it’s very difficult to get clear again. But I managed to clear my work inbox before I left a week ago (I’m sure it’s loaded now, but I haven’t looked at it, so that doesn’t count). And I spent most of today clearing my Gmail inbox, which was even harder work.

Most of what I’d left in my Gmail inbox came from one of two sources: The Union for Reform Judaism‘s weekly Torat Chayim and daily Ten Minutes of Torah mailings accounted for the biggest share, along with Kolel’s weekly commentary. I’d fallen behind while travelling some time during the summer, and every time I thought about catching up, the size of the task discouraged me. And so I fell behind further every week. But today seemed like a good opportunity to make a dent in the backlog, and once I got started, I got into a rhythm. I did take a few breaks, but I finally caught up.

Of course, there’ll be new mailings next week (as well as the other stuff which arrives in the mail), but at least for tonight, I feel that I’ve accomplished something, just in time for Chanukah.