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
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:4, Informative)
Gmail = labels/filters + basically unlimited disk usage + search = My best experience with email since 1996. And I install Exchange for a (partial) living. shhh
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Insightful)
On a different note, TFA is a great and inspiring self-help article:
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".
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:5, Informative)
Am I missing something here?
Yes.
You are using Mail.app and Spotlight (I do too) so you don't think gmail is so amazing.
But if you were to use another e-mail client for a while (AOL, Outlook, etc) you would realize just how TERRIBLE the average e-mail program's search ability is. It just doesn't work that well. Often, they search by (seemingly) walking though the e-mails one by one. Thus when you have 1000 e-mails searches take 10x as long as when you have 100. If you were to try to search through my backed e-mail (2-3 years) it would take a LONG time. Compare this to a fraction of a second to do the same with Spotlight (or gmail).
The live results and updates that Spotlight gives is what makes it so powerful.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:2)
That pisses me off to know end, and I'd love to know how to fix it.
I keep every non-spam e-mail I receive because it makes my inbox a datastore that I can mine later on. It has helped me out of technical jams, reminded me of forgotten information, and saved my ass in a lawsuit. But every e-mail I receive at work (I'm forced to use outlook at work) makes it take that much longer to find the bit of data I need, which
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:2)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:4, Informative)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Informative)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:2)
I'm sort of the same way. I keep all my e-mail (that I don't actively want to see) in a set of folder for mostly historical reasons (I like being organized, and dumping it all in one huge folder would annoy me). The main folders are:
Now the last one contain
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Informative)
Those should really be stored as 'secure notes' in your keychain. That way at least they're stored encrypted and it requires your keychain password to get them.
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:2)
but it goes beyond casual passwords if you use something like GPG: what would be a safer place for your passwords than an encrypted email to yourself locked behind your GPG secret key and passphrase?
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
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a Windows user, so that particular problem is taken care of for me every couple of years whether I like it or not.
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.
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:here's one that's unbelievable (Score:2)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:5, Informative)
Re:gmail solved my clutter (Score:3, Informative)
> very well may be criminal to delete some of those nine thousand emails
Nice try.
If it's a federal law to keep emails, then the company's compliance department should be archiving all incoming and outgoing mails to an archive store, not depending on a desktop user to keep thousands of emails organized for years at a time.
I guarantee you any real "global insurance company" is complying with the data retention laws within t
You are your inbox. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You are your inbox. (Score:2)
Re:You are your inbox. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You are your inbox. (Score:2)
I, for one, welcome our Spiced Ham Overlords.
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.
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:2)
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 m
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.
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:What an excellent article. (Score:2)
(Hey, now here is an idea: make moderations visible as entries, like comments!)
My Inbox (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My Inbox (Score:2)
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:Me vs. My Parents (Score:5, Funny)
No, you can't have my tinfoil hat.
Don't delete e-mails. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what would they say about someone who (Score:2)
Re:So what would they say about someone who (Score:2, Funny)
"I for one welcome my email sorting and organizing overlord!"
Re:So what would they say about someone who (Score:2)
Too much free time?
Re:So what would they say about someone who (Score:2)
OCD (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OCD (Score:2)
Re:OCD (Score:2)
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?"
You are not alone (Score:2, 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.
Re:it's a skill.. (Score:3, Funny)
Who are you, the email Nazi? NO IMAP FOR YOU!
Re:it's a skill.. (Score:2)
Re:it's a skill.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It always amazes me when people think that everyone should be good at their particular strengths.
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
Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It (Score:3, Funny)
Defer it -- not tonight dear, I have a headache
Delegate it -- go fuck yourself
Delete it -- I'm leaving you
my email client is clean (Score:2)
Re:my email client is clean (Score:2)
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.
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
Organization! (Score:2)
My In box is used exclusively for immediate, pressing emails. They are almost all from the last week, and are generally emails that I have not responded to, but need to. Sometimes I keep an email in there that I have responded to, but that just means that I *need* a response, and that I should email the person again if I do not hear back.
If my In box ever gets more than about 10-12 messages
Delete! (Score:2, Funny)
large hard drive + good search = keep everything (Score:3, Interesting)
It Says Nothing (Score:2)
According to me, the whole thing is nonsense.
history (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullsh*t! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bullsh*t! (Score:2)
If the technology existed to make housework as easy as email, wouldn't you use it?
Re:Bullsh*t! (Score:2)
Simple solution. stop screwing around on the computer, get your narrow ass outta that chair, and clean your room!
Flaw in Theory (Score:2)
ah, but (Score:2)
(or by just poting at something and telling it where to go), then he would be correct.
Re:Flaw in Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow... how appropriate! (Score:2)
I've JUST spent the past three weeks emptying out my Inbox. I had over 1000 messages, going back to 2002, and all messages I felt deserved some kind of answer. (I run a rather busy website, and folk are mailing me for help or complaints all the time).
Unfortuantely, if I let an email sit for a while - like, its a difficult problem to deal with - it'll get buried in other mail, and before I know it, I have a hundred messages, then 200, then 500, and you can guess the re
Re:Wow... how appropriate! (Score:2)
How quaint. Somebody with only 1,000 emails. You should win an award for "Slashdot reader with least email traffic" or something.
Both! (Score:2)
The thing is that I never empty the trash - I still have emails as far back as 2001 in there
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...
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!
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.
I am a HISTORIAN (Score:2)
Screw e-mail. (Score:2)
Email Middens from 1987! (Score:2)
Don't delete anything. You'd be surprised at what becomes valuable or worthy of a chuckle 20 years later. Or archeology given long enough.
See also: midden [wikipedia.org].
Inbox agnostic (Score:3, Funny)
Piss off. I'm not doing what you tell me to, and submitting you your repressive inbox-ocracy. I refuse to even consider the idea that an inbox exists.
Enforced Discarding (Score:2)
Now for a drop in office productivity. (Score:2)
B-)
University Mail (Score:2)
The university I work for has a mail server and we are all "encouraged" to use this for our mail.
OK, but the mailbox there has a 100Mb limit and if I keep any amount of the mail on the server (which I assume is backed up - an added plus) I run into the limit quickly (it doesn't take many ".doc" files and that is the format that everyone uses). Which then means I need to spend quite a bit of time moving things around. I'd download them (actually, I do download them, but using IMAP so a copy stays on th
Not so sure (Score:2)
Get yourself a good IMAP provider (try www.fastmail.fm), set up spam filering and some Seive filtering on the server side and you'll never see clutter again. Mailing lists go into their folders, family stuff goes into a family folder, and clients go to their own place. Setting
Huh? (Score:2)
Now I understand that people have quotas on their mail spool and the like, what what the hell
Work (Score:2)
As I sit here at home, though, fearing to go to my gmail inbox as it's a mess, looking around m
the number you get per day matters... (Score:2)
I get about 20 emails a day, which means about 3 per hour. Of those, half are informative messages sent to me from one of my servers (which can be read and then deleted). So I only have to manage/respond to one email per hour. That
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.
Northwest Florida News for Nerds? (Score:2)
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).
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?
I see no need to ever delete anything (Score:2)
Admittidly, my goal is to have all the information that has ever existed and I wish painful death on anyone and any group that would prevent that. As a member of homo sapiens all the information that has ever existed or will exist is my birthright (except for the private information of others, if they wish to be paranoid; I prefer the slow public death of those who abuse rather than preventing access to, information). Outside of spam I archive nearly everyth
My Inbox... (Score:2)
Why delete? (Score:2)
I do clean out my inbox by the end of every day, though. The emails either get answered and moved to a per month o
Couldn't finish the article (Score:2)
Shudder. How can someone use the "Delete" word with such abandon? Sure, eliminate the oldest 9,000 messages by archiving them to CD with a copy of Mutt. But delete? Never!
My motto, "Email becomes inoperative when the media becomes unreadable." Which, I've come to accept probably applies to my Commodore floppies from the 80s.
Let's try this from a non-scientific standpoint. (Score:2)
I re-route four main 'form' emails to a local frat's folder, ff.net, LiveJournal, and Slashdot (natch). I either find these important enough to take note of, or 'just' distinguishable enough that I jump upon seeing them.
Likewise, I have over 150 messages in my inbox from my ex, who I could shunt into a folder as well, but I figured out that I'd just rather delete the lot of them after a while, but because m
Query the DB (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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.