Processing an overwhelming amount of advice is an important skill as a teacher.

It feels so important to get this right.

And much of the advice you receive is pretty solid.

But not all advice is worth taking right now, and some is not worth taking at all.

Before my first year of teaching, a veteran teacher told me: Whatever you do, stay out of the teacher’s lounge!

She said it would be full of negative teachers, gossiping about the kids, gossiping about each other, and probably gossiping about me as soon as I left the room.

That veteran teacher’s advice ended up being. . . well. . . not that far off.

That being said, I don’t think that the advice about staying out of the teacher’s lounge is meant to be taken literally. When people give you that advice, they’re actually using “the teacher’s lounge” as a shorthand for something else.

That something is toxic negativity.

Teachers aren’t supposed to be negative, right?

But why is it sometimes an objectively positive statement that feels like a sucker punch to your soul?

Why have you been in a bad mood for hours just because somebody said, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care?”

I’ve always loved speaking at new teacher orientations.

These speeches have been one of my favorite forms of time travel—a way of visiting that past version of myself who was sitting in a squeaky chair in a Houston auditorium, taking notes in a double-wide binder, trying to plan my first day lesson without having any real sense of how a class full of nine-year-olds would act.

Most of the time, when you’re going through emails, you’re just trying to keep up. And that’s fine.

But every now and then, it’s time to deep clean your inbox.

Deep cleaning your inbox is different than just going through your emails because as you go along, you’re putting systems in place to make things easier to handle in the long term.

This post goes along with my YouTube Video on this topic. In both the post and video, my hope is to go past the obvious advice and help you turn your inbox into a space that is manageable for you in the long-term.