Hoarders vs. Deleters- What Your Inbox Says 328
BlueCup writes "You are your inbox. Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages. The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you." I always knew my obsessive packratting said something important about me as a human being.
What an excellent article. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have 1,215 messages in my inbox and all of them have been answered. I keep them because it's a "paper trail" for when someone asks me about it again in 6 months.
Don't delete e-mails. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's a skill.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
And for some reason these people say that being disorganized is being "creative" or something like that. Uh? Unless you're some kind of performance artist whose medium is a desk, papers, and computer, you should learn to focus your creativity in your work or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. I've seen the studios of famous artists who paint crazy, disorganized, abstract paintings.. they are often neat and clean and all the tools, like brushes and paints, are in a row, ready to use. These people have learned to focus their energy on their work, and not trying to find the Cadmium Yellow in that pile on the floor.
Another thing about being disorganized: it keeps you from scaling. Limits the number of projects you can do or the hobbies you can keep track of. What a drag.
Personally I recommend the Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It routine (found in Getting Things Done and other books). Just practice it for a month and see if doesn't make your life a little bit smoother to see that empty inbox.
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
Even this article gives the impression that a messy inbox is just a "lifestyle choice", or something your parents taught you. Forget it. An organized inbox, desk, computer, etc., will almost always win over a sloppy one. So stop blaming your genes or your parents or the clock and GET ORGANIZED. Especially if you work with me.
Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
At work I keep almost every e-mail I get. I want them all to stay long enough to get backed up (policy is actually that we MUST do that, though it's not enforced) however I've plenty of space, there's no need to delete them. That way, should there be a question about something some months later, I can look it up in the old mail. Once a year or so I trash everything over 6 months old, if it was important I'd have already filed it away in an important folder.
My inbox habits aren't really related to how I do things in my personal life, just to what the technology allows me to do. It's not like I leave the mails waiting because I haven't responded, I just leave them because there's no compelling reason to delete them regularly, and several to not do so.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:5, Insightful)
history (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing criminal about deleting your old e-mail whenever you feel like it to free up space or clean things up. It may be criminal to hide evidence of wrongdoing by deleting your mail, and you might get into hot water if it looks like you were trying to cover something up by your "housekeeping," but a blanket statement of calling deleting email "probably criminal" is ridiculous.
There's enough dumb laws without people dreaming up imaginary ones.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:2, Insightful)
Convenient email backup, access from anywhere, combined chats and emails, labels, an excellent spam filter and the best email interface (IMO) (I prefer it over thunderbird, which is nice too
But I find search to be a ittle disappointing in Gmail, there is no spell checker , no suggested words, no word splitter
My GOffice (Score:2, Insightful)
* Search, don't sort
* Don't throw anything away
No so keen on
* Keep it all in context
There are few things I would not do to have Google, Spotlight, or even grep for my office!
My solution to email (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to say I'm organized enough to have every filter set up. Still, I usually don't let more than a couple hundred messages build up before I clear them out.
Re:OCD or something like it (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes I go through my disk to free up space and I find files and wonder "Why the hell is this still on here?"
Personal habits (Score:3, Insightful)
My wife has this weird thing about creating category folders, and then sub-folders for the individual people she talks to, with an auto-filter for each sub-folder. Migrating that monstrosity from OE to Thunderbird was Not Fun (tm).
You are not alone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:it's a skill.. (Score:3, Insightful)
But it also amazes me when I see people who are incredibly organized, expend a lot of emotional energy staying that way, but then are constrained by their pre-allocations of time so that they can't focus on important priorities.
Let's take a case in point: I ran a chem lab for 14 years. It was messy. I knew where everything was, but the students didn't (although that got better over time). Why was it messy? Because there were loads of projects going on all at once. Because as the students worked, I would circulate about and ask them questions about what they were doing. Then, I moved out of chem and on to other things. The new chem teacher is possessed by the spirit of Felix Unger [wikipedia.org]. The lab is neat, the principal is delighted -- but the students do about half as many labs, because Felix can't stand to have glassware out after the bell rings, so he gets less done during the period.This is correct. My method wouldn't work if I had 5 lab periods in a row. BUT
Extending this to the file system... (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to adminster a number of OS X machines, and I always thought that spending 5 minutes on a user's machine could tell me more about their brain than working with them for years. Email tidyness is just the tip of the iceberg:
It's all a window straight into their soul.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Insightful)
On a different note, TFA is a great and inspiring self-help article:
Great way to deal with the problem, yeah.Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Insightful)
That it defaults to top-posting (and worse, offers no option to turn off this misbehavior) makes it terminally broken, IMNSHO.
Top-posting does not make an email app "terminally broken". If Gmail was broken people wouldn't be able to use it, yet strangely they can, therefore you must be mistaken.
Expected behavior is defined by the majority, who top-post. You're welcome to be a refusnik if you like, but that reduces the weight of your opinion when discussing UI design decisions for consumer-focused webmail products.
Options to do X, Y and Z cost money and add complication. There's only a borderline case for adding that option considering that proponents of bottom-posting are much more likely to have their own email arrangements.
Gmail is not for you. I accept that. However your criticism is incomplete and inaccurate, and seems motivated mostly by egotism.