Declaring email bankruptcy
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Alternative title: making good use of my insomnia
I’m quite proud of this picture:
In particular, see that little number showing my unread emails? A week ago it was in the thousands.
I chose a date and marked as read everything before it. Then isolated a month worth of unread emails at a time (Gmail has great tools for this) and did a first pass of individual deletions and then opened the few that remained. Doing it in bite sized chunks like this made it much more manageable and less intimidating to even start.
I finished this morning.
My theory, which will start to be tested immediately, is I’ll be much better at clearing it daily. Sort of like broken windows theory but for email.
(By the way the number of unread is now at zero but I thought a really small number would be better to illustrate this)
“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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I currently have 7 in my personal email, and maybe 20 in my work in-box. I cannot stand email getting out of hand, it gives me serious anxiety, so I'm ruthless in getting rid of it. I tell colleagues if that if they cc me rather send it directly, I delete without reading. It doesn't stop them doing it, but it means I'm not obligated to read any of their crap.
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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.
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Alternative title: making good use of my insomnia
I’m quite proud of this picture:
In particular, see that little number showing my unread emails? A week ago it was in the thousands.
I chose a date and marked as read everything before it. Then isolated a month worth of unread emails at a time (Gmail has great tools for this) and did a first pass of individual deletions and then opened the few that remained. Doing it in bite sized chunks like this made it much more manageable and less intimidating to even start.
I finished this morning.
My theory, which will start to be tested immediately, is I’ll be much better at clearing it daily. Sort of like broken windows theory but for email.
(By the way the number of unread is now at zero but I thought a really small number would be better to illustrate this)
@jon-nyc congrats! Good strategy and I get the broken windows idea.
@Doctor-Phibes my dad has like 25,000 unread. Kills me.
For me, I used to keep it low but am around 700 right now which is by far my lifetime highest. Many are items I send myself to do later or shows to watch, my plan is to each day knock out 20 then I should be clear.
I’m also a rapid unsubscriber.
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My God, you people are sick.
Email is one of the the few things I can control in my life. And I'm completely draconian with it.
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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
-
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.
