2022-01-23 Email Collapse

Munching on a salad while my wife is preparing for meetings tomorrow. Ugh! Working on a Sunday, every Sunday. Well, I guess I should go back to email…

I don’t know what happened. Last year I was thinking to myself: this is great! I’m rediscovering email. People are sending me long emails. I writing back long emails. I feel like a letter writer again! I love it!

Oh, and I realized that emails was also a perfect archive for me. I can send PDFs to myself, and links, no matter where I am. On the work laptop, on the phone, on the tablet. I don’t have to rely on browsers bookmarks and sync, on filesystem sync services, or anything else, for the small inconvenience of having to type a few letter of my email address. Share, pick Mail icon, type “alex”, hit send, done.

But now suddenly things started piling up. I wasn’t answering emails as they came in. I was waiting for the ominous “when do I feel like cleaning up stuff” moment in the evening after work. And that moment came and went more often than not. And now I am staring at nearly 100 mails in my Inbox. Whaaaat!

I need to schedule some email clean-up or else the email default day will come for sure. 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 📧 🔥 🔥 🔥 😬

​#Life ​#Mail

Comments

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Down to 42. Please, no more mail! 😥

– Alex 2022-01-23 16:08 UTC

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i have 7000 unread emails

– okiguess 2022-01-24 02:39 UTC

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Uuuugh time to just switch accounts.

– Alex 2022-01-24 07:25 UTC

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I have the same issue with my normal paper letters. I always postpone, I tell myself that I will respond later when I will be in the right mood, but then 5 or 6 letters are waiting for the response.

– Peter 2022-01-25 16:14 UTC

Peter

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And how do you get back into it? Burn ‘em all in a pyre and start anew or oldest first or newest first?

– Alex 2022-01-28 19:04 UTC

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I usually do some notes when I read the letter - on what topics are we talking or what not to forget to mention in my reply. So I start with the one where I can feel that it would be the easiest for me to just write and write and write, maybe a whole letter at once (I usually do 4-5 pages A4 size per letter).

But of course, I also like to respond in the FIFO fashion 😀

– Peter 2022-01-29 04:28 UTC

Peter

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i have over 2000 emails in just one of my accounts... and I have 5 email accounts that I use 😢

– Anonymous 2022-01-31 03:22 UTC

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I don’t know how you will ever get to the bottom of this. I am down to 16 right now. Answering a few emails, moving some out of the inbox because I’m not quite ready to delete them quite yet but I’m also pretty sure I won’t be answering them, either. Perhaps I can delete those folders after a few weeks.

– Alex 2022-02-02 22:07 UTC