| Wednesday, October 07, 2009 |
| Anatomy of an inbox |
A few days ago, I came down with a cold -- despite my hypochondria, I'm fairly certain it wasn't the swine flu, just the kind of head cold that causes a perpetually runny nose, sore throat and mild aches & pains. Happily, unlike the previous time I had a cold (in Sweden last year), I had access to NyQuil. For those who haven't taken this miracle substance, it gets rid of all your symptoms, for a price: the fact that it completely knocks you out and makes your head feel like the contents have been scooped out with a melon baller. Now, I'd rather have my nose stop running and be able to sleep through the night, but the downside is pretty significant in that it renders me fairly non-functional and unable to do much more than look at the pictures on Go Fug Yourself, drink tea, and watch "Dancing with the Stars."
So my email has been piling up like crazy, and I'm starting to realize that I have a problem -- an email problem. My inbox, which I try to keep at a reasonably tidy 50-60 messages, currently has 229. This is the reason I can never go on vacation without bringing the laptop along; the stress of returning home to hundreds of unread messages negates whatever relaxation I might have enjoyed while on a break.
Is it even possible to tame the inbox monster? My email program displays 50 messages per screen, and here's what's up on the current one:
Seven of the emails are from clients, including a couple cc:s that don't require any immediate action on my part. Two are from my mom asking me to make updates to a web site I manage for her. I guess I could kind of count her as a client, in this specific instance.
Six more are related to the lineups page I maintain -- new listings from contacts at the shows, and, poignantly, an email from a guy in the Air Force (he has an af.mil address) asking why I haven't updated the page recently. I am letting down our men and women in uniform! Guilt!!
Five emails are news-related. I'm on various NPR, New York Times and SFGate mailing lists that send me email when news breaks. Turns out the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes study of ribosomes! And Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to veto lots of stuff! I like to be the first to know things. I have fond memories of being online in Sweden at the exact moment the Times email landed in my inbox announcing that John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. Thousands of miles away, and still up on the politics at home.
There are a couple of emails where I just don't understand how they wound up in my inbox at all. "Help pick the official Gavin Newsom logo," for instance. I would never in a million years have signed up for a Newsom for Governor mailing list, and yet here he is, asking me to choose which graphic design I prefer. There's no way he's going to get the nomination unless Jerry Brown has a change of heart and drops out of the race, so why bother picking? I'm just surprised none of them are blatant rip-offs of that Obama "O" design.
Three emails come from MySpace -- I hate MySpace, but I maintain a seldom-updated page for the Loud Family, so the friend requests and comments land in my inbox.
One -- yes, just one out of 50 -- email is a personal note from a friend. Thanks, Rog.
Everything else, approximately half of the 50 emails, is from a mailing list. There's the comic of the day, puppy of the day, newsletters from CDBaby, PayPal, Amazon Associates and my web hosting provider, a couple of messages from ecto (a music-related mailing list I've been on for a good 15 years now). Chicago Public Radio wants to send me a tote bag, probably because of some "This American Life"-related donation I made long ago. Kashi wants to send me coupons. Tickets to "Finian's Rainbow" on Broadway are just $55, and "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" movie will be showing in San Francisco.
Ordinarily, I can keep up with it all since I'm online all day, every day, working efficiently, deleting and archiving. But confronting it in one big clump is daunting, and makes me want to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over my head. I may drift off into a Nyquil-dazed slumber, but the emails never stop coming. |
posted by 125records @ 2:57 PM  |
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| 3 Comments: |
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Oh boy, do I hear you - except my inbox panic threshold is *20* messages (but that's per email address, so I suppose 60 total, but I don't like to think of it that way). So I'm in a panic nearly all the time, esp. since the work email (which arrives at the rate of 25-50 messages/day) and the SL email always include a high percentage of action-required items.
I would (do) have NO problem, however, skimming through the mailing list/news-related/similar emails, or filing them unread, or deleting them unread, depending on their potential import and what email service I'm using. I think you could halve that first page of messages in the time I'm taking to write this comment.
One thing that sets my teeth on edge, though it's none of my business, is some folks' habit of leaving EVERYTHING in their inbox, either as permanent storage or because they are perhaps not entirely finished with each of those several thousand messages. Very large headache just thinking about this! My husband behaves this way and so does my best friend at work.
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Janet: I do skim/delete mailing list e-mails rather quickly, but I decided to leave them there yesterday so I could get an Andy Rooney-esque blog post out of them. I guess my point is that even if I can dispatch them quickly, there's a certain panic that sets in when you sit down at your computer and see that you have 200 unread messages. The psychic toll that it takes is considerable. I'm going to try steering some of that type of nonessential traffic over to my Yahoo account, which I check much less frequently.
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It doesn't bother me to have lots of e-mail in my inbox. They don't strike me as "to do" items screaming for my action, and Gmail's search engine and labeling system makes it easy for me to retrieve particular messages quickly. No panic here at all.
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Name: Sue
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Oh boy, do I hear you - except my inbox panic threshold is *20* messages (but that's per email address, so I suppose 60 total, but I don't like to think of it that way). So I'm in a panic nearly all the time, esp. since the work email (which arrives at the rate of 25-50 messages/day) and the SL email always include a high percentage of action-required items.
I would (do) have NO problem, however, skimming through the mailing list/news-related/similar emails, or filing them unread, or deleting them unread, depending on their potential import and what email service I'm using. I think you could halve that first page of messages in the time I'm taking to write this comment.
One thing that sets my teeth on edge, though it's none of my business, is some folks' habit of leaving EVERYTHING in their inbox, either as permanent storage or because they are perhaps not entirely finished with each of those several thousand messages. Very large headache just thinking about this! My husband behaves this way and so does my best friend at work.