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.
gmail solved my clutter (Score:5, Interesting)
And I did (and still do) fit the clutter definition. I currently have about 1500 gmails, and I long ago stopped paying much care to them other than scanning and letting go. Google takes care of the rest.
I have on file (old computers, old e-mail clients (elm, pine, thunderbird, on and on)) about 15 to 20 thousand e-mails, and it's always been a dilemma what to keep and what to throw away. What to deem important and what to forget. Ultimately I wrote my own software to manage my e-mail, wrote an inverted index machine (more than ten years ago, and did it as a shell script(!)). That took care of most of my needs and certainly surpassed the features of any e-mail clients at the time.
But with that system I had the added anxiety of modifying/creating/maintaining my home-grown e-mail management software. Sigh.
Now, with gmail, most of the features I needed (but not all) are provided and implemented much better than I ever did. If I can remember just one or two words from an important e-mail, it's almost always enough to retrieve the desired note using gmail index. I don't even bother marking things as important. If they're important, they come up.
From the article: In Greensboro, N.C., Internet consultant Wally Bock keeps his inbox down to a manageable few dozen messages. He credits his sense of order to "having disciplined parents who made that a value." . YOu don't have to do this anymore with gmail. There is virtually no difference between e-mail that is "there", or "archived". Of course there is a difference if it is deleted, but why bother? For most users, gmail gives enough storage to not need to distinguish between throwing something away or keeping it.
Also from the article: A saner way to pare down an inbox is to move email into folders, by subject or need for follow-up, and once a week set aside time for inbox housekeeping. Again, with gmail, not necessary! If you can remember a few key words, you're golden!
And, I wonder at this recommendation from an "expert" in the article: University of Toronto instructor Christina Cavanagh studied hundreds of office workers for her book "Managing Your Email: Thinking Outside the Inbox." One of her subjects, a finance executive, had 10,000 emails in his inbox. She advised him to simply delete the oldest 9,000. Insane! And dangerous! Let Google manage that, and avoid the risk of "suffering the consequences" for stupid management techniques.
Since I've "switched", my e-mail life has been virtually stress free, and how and what I manage with e-mail has improved my day to day management of communications dramatically. This is close to life (in e-mail) as it should be.
YMMV
Me vs. My Parents (Score:5, Interesting)
Myself, I'm a hoarder with organization. I save EVERY email somewhere (except for spam which gets cleared out once and a while). Things get filed away as soon as possible. I read it, then I file it. The exceptions are the things I want kept at my attention. Open orders, ongoing discussions, and the last letter from a select friend or two are always in there. If I'm done with it, it's filed. I'd have mail going back 6 or 7 years if it wasn't for a hard drive crash. As it is, it only goes back about 2 or 3.
Now the thing I finder interesting is my parents. They use AOL and are self taught. I've been moving them over to gmail but their habits have stayed with them.
The thing you have to understand is that AOL has this really queer behavior where if you've read an e-mail, it will delete it. If you read an e-mail and then leave AOL, it gets moved somewhere. After that, it quickly gets deleted automatically. I'm not sure why they do this, but it is the behavior I've seen. So if you want to keep an e-mail, you have two options. You can save it somewhere in another folder (which they do sometimes), or you can click "keep as new" (marks the message unread). So anything they think they'll read again gets marked "keep as new". This means they always have "new" mail. They can't look and see "I have 2 new messages" because they are ALL new messages (so they would have to remember the previous number).
But by and large they are deleters. When they are done with an e-mail unless they think they have a good reason to save it, they just let it get deleted (or recently they have been speeding it up by pressing delete).
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:4, Interesting)
OCD (Score:2, Interesting)
What an STUPID article. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the main thing a large inbox tells about a user is that he uses tools capable of working easily against a large inbox.
With reasonable tools (imap if you keep them on the server, and good search indexes on the client) 50,000 emails isn't unmanageable. With tools that suck (pop if you keep them on the server) an inbox of 100 gets ugly.
I have almost(*) all the email I've ever received since 1986 or so; organized in two mail-folders per year (one for spam). It's quite a few (well, many) gig of email; but interesting nonetheless. It's also quite useful when answering the "didn't you get my email" type questions.
But the primary reason I don't delete them is "why should I - my email client already marks them as 'read', and once it did that, the email is out of the way and no longer bothers me unless I actively search for it".
(*) company data retention policies made me delete some work related emails.
Folders, rules, unread (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never had an email clutter issue. Searching through emails is easy too. My sent mail is organized in nested folders too. Now if only Thunderbird could apply rules to my sent emails automatically.
large hard drive + good search = keep everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullsh*t! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's nothing. I literally have 12,000+ messages in my inbox at home, and anybody who hasn't received a response from one of them isn't going to get one.
The reason I keep them is simple. In this digital age, it's the only record I have of my correspondence with a great many people -- some of it memorable, some of it totally frivolous. Think about it: The only record. Have you ever noticed those six-volume collected editions of the letters of famous writers? Well, I and you might never be that important, but even if we were, guess what? Nobody writes letters anymore. Unless you do something to hang onto it, anything you spirit away into the Internet ether is essentially gone for good.
So why not hang onto it? There's all kinds of stuff in that inbox. It's a paper trail, sure ... but it's also a crate full of opportunities acted upon or otherwise, phone numbers I forgot to write down elsewhere, copies of old files, heck, even plain old memories. Why take the time to sort through it all and decide what's what, when the entire archive can be zipped onto a keychain USB drive in less than a minute, and even the most basic email client can search out anything I want to find in the whole stack in a few seconds?
Clearly this jerk is just another typical psychologist, willing to say anything to keep the Thetans trapped in my body.
P.S. Oh, for the record, that email client is Thunderbird. 12,000 messages and counting, works just fine. Beat that, Outlook.
Inbox Zero, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever since discovering Inbox Zero [43folders.com], I am a happier man.
For me, this means:
That way I don't have to wonder, "Say, I think there was some email I was meaning to deal with, where was it, somewhere in here, was it last week? And it's such a joy to have a perfectly empty It really is a great methodology / philosophy, and I heartily recommend it.
Of course, I'd have more cred as a gettting-things-done wizard if I weren't reading Slashdot at the moment...
Living in the past (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't begin to describe how useful it is to keep a comprehensive email history. With a good system of labelling, archiving and searching, anything can be retrieved in a matter of seconds. Every day I query my mail archives: to find old contacts; to recall what was said in a conversation a year ago; to re-read old minutes. I have even taken to emailing memos and reminders to myself so that they can be searched in the same process with my communications.
here's one that's unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
I was astounded when I first observed it. I seen it several times now. No joke.
Re:Evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to do that, too. I had this file with all the spam I'd received, back to the first one I ever got: An offer to sell me software to automate sending email to multiple recipients and a list of email addresses.
I recall thinking, at the time: "Oh oh! There goes email. We'll be buried in junkmail within a couple months, once this guy's customers and all the copycats get deployed." (This is time I've most hated being dead-on with a prediction. B-( )
Unfortunately, that was a while ago, when disk space was far more precious. My disk filled up to the point that I had to dump something to keep the system going, and couldn't get expanded in time. The collected spam file was the main culprit so it had to go.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Interesting)
I have about 40,000 emails from the last 3 years of work. If anyone seriously expects me to manually move those to some folder they have another thing coming. If they expect me to delete them, they don't understand the value of an information archive.
For the outlook users out there:
I've found the free LookOut search plugin for outlook to be pretty good, especially since it can search my huge archive folders. I used to try to organize my email by using outlook's braindead rules system, but now everything just goes to the inbox, and to find something I search using lookout.
If I leave something I need to reply to for later, I flag it as for followup. If I don't flag it, or don't reply immediately, then it's considered dealt with.
The other important thing is adjusting the settings, to remove the preview pane and/or adjust it so that once you read an email it is marked as read immediately, not 5 seconds later or whatever that outlook does by default. That avoids the buildup of supposedly "unread" mail. This way, the unread mail search folder is my "inbox", and is always managable.
The only thing I lack is the ability to have "search folders" span archives, the same way that lookout does.
Re:Flaw in Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Boss: "So, why didn't you inform executive A that we were going to cut over the website this week."
Me: "I did, a few months ago, I think. I remember talking to her on the phone."
Boss: "She's swearing up and down that she's never heard anything about it."
Me: "Bullshit." (When said to your boss, you'd BETTER damn well be able to put your money where your mouth is.)
Boss: "This is a pretty big deal. It came up in the executive briefing. Do you have an email trail or anything?"
Me: "Yeah. Let me send you all the related emails. (*clickity-click*) There you go. Looks like we talked about it in May. I'm sorry she's bugging you about it."
Boss: "Don't worry about it. This is no longer our problem."
Article is Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially when so much business correspondance takes place via email, isn't it better to be safe and keep things around "just in case" than sorry if you happen to need them?
Query the DB (Score:3, Interesting)
But it is a skill. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Spam-Trap Inbox (Score:2, Interesting)
This tends to be 5-10 messages a day (filters low to avoid false positives) and maybe once a month or so I get a real email that remains in the inbox.
I currently have about 50-70,000 emails in my mail client with another 250,000 archived...
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:here's one that's unbelievable (Score:2, Interesting)