Declaring email bankruptcy
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I read, quite some time ago, that some early computer tech luminary dispensing productivity advice telling people they should take care of all their emails everyday, and that ideally email inboxes should be cleared daily.
That's before Gmail, and certainly before junk mail. Heck, that's when people only get email at work, before email for personal use is common.
@Axtremus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
I read, quite some time ago, that some early computer tech luminary dispensing productivity advice telling people they should take care of all their emails everyday, and that ideally email inboxes should be cleared daily.
That's before Gmail, and certainly before junk mail. Heck, that's when people only get email at work, before email for personal use is common.
One of the most impressive decisions I learned about was by Donald Knuth, who decided his life was not better by spending any attention on messages directed at him by the world. He swore off email in the early 90s.
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Of course I won't ever read them. I think it's a waste of time to organize your emails or to strive for "inbox zero".
My attention span is the list of most recent emails that still fit on the screen. Everything that falls outside of that will never be looked at again, unless I'm searching for it. Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
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inbox zero can be achieved by clicking on the ... button and choosing "mark all as read". At least, in my email app. I'm always aware that my eyes have passed over the titles of every email I've received, and it doesn't take long. I'm not motivated enough to "mark all as read" very often, because it adds nothing to my sense of order. My sense of order is predicated on the fact that I've looked at all my emails, at least their titles. I do have multiple folders where I direct stuff from important senders to. My primary inbox is a great deal of spam and a few interesting things.
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Of course I won't ever read them. I think it's a waste of time to organize your emails or to strive for "inbox zero".
My attention span is the list of most recent emails that still fit on the screen. Everything that falls outside of that will never be looked at again, unless I'm searching for it. Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
@Klaus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
I don't read them, I delete them. Leaving them there unread like a festering monstrosity eating into my psyche would be bad.
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Just looking at the pictures makes me fill ill.
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For me the problem wasn’t the number being 7,000 instead of zero. The problem was I would occasionally - nay, often - see an email, know I needed to react to it but not have the time in the moment, and think “I’ll go back tonight and deal with it’. Then I’d forget, and soon it was lost among its 7000 mostly useless friends.
If I mange to zero that won’t happen. If I forget, its unread status will be there as an effective reminder that night or the next day.
“In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once.”
- Former Speaker of the House John Boehner
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It's quite possible I have OCD, or as I prefer to call it CDO, because it has the letters in the correct order.
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Of course I won't ever read them. I think it's a waste of time to organize your emails or to strive for "inbox zero".
My attention span is the list of most recent emails that still fit on the screen. Everything that falls outside of that will never be looked at again, unless I'm searching for it. Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
@Klaus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
You shouldn’t. That what the delete button is for.
“In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once.”
- Former Speaker of the House John Boehner
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For me the problem wasn’t the number being 7,000 instead of zero. The problem was I would occasionally - nay, often - see an email, know I needed to react to it but not have the time in the moment, and think “I’ll go back tonight and deal with it’. Then I’d forget, and soon it was lost among its 7000 mostly useless friends.
If I mange to zero that won’t happen. If I forget, its unread status will be there as an effective reminder that night or the next day.
@jon-nyc said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
The problem was I would occasionally - nay, often - see an email, know I needed to react to it but not have the time in the moment, and think “I’ll go back tonight and deal with it’. Then I’d forget, and soon it was lost among its 7000 mostly useless friends.
The way I deal with that is to apply a label to the email that I know I want to follow up later. In Gmail, I apply the "star." I also have other custom-defined labels for various things. And it's easy to have Gmail give me a filtered list of emails.
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@Klaus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
Also, many emails I consider irrelevant just from looking at the title or sender, so why should I read them?
You shouldn’t. That what the delete button is for.
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@jon-nyc said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
You shouldn’t. That what the delete button is for.
Takes too long. An extra click. Also, what if I'm wrong and it is in fact important? Then I still want to be able to find it later on.
@Klaus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
@jon-nyc said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
You shouldn’t. That what the delete button is for.
Takes too long. An extra click. Also, what if I'm wrong and it is in fact important? Then I still want to be able to find it later on.
How will you know if you don't read it?
This is nothing more than electronic hoarding!
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Easy. Somebody sends me a reminder or another email about that previous email that I didn't read and then I can look it up. Happened to me many times.
There is no reason to ever delete an email. Storage grows much faster than your inbox.
@Klaus said in Declaring email bankruptcy:
Easy. Somebody sends me a reminder or another email about that previous email that I didn't read and then I can look it up. Happened to me many times.
Yes, they will send an email, which 99% of the time has the original email underneath it.
And if you didn't read the original email, why on earth would you read the follow-up?
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My guess is you guys keep all those emails in the vain hope that your penis will actually grow and that beautiful French women actually do want to meet you.
Trust me, none of it works, however much money you pay.
