Just wanted to brag a bit.
Of course, before bragging I have to confess that I let that many stupid emails pile up to start with. They dated back to sometime in early September. How does this happen? Well, the email slave — that being me — fails to keep up with it for a few busy days. Then, it’s too much to deal with in less than an hour, and my fitful, inadequate efforts to whittle it down by a couple of days become more and more obviously pointless, and I lose hope.
So despite those puny efforts, at the start of the holidays the pile was at about 12,000, even though I had eliminated thousands since September, in small batches. I say “about” because I didn’t take an inventory, which requires taking a second to add up the “Primary,” “Social” and “Promotions” subdivisions of my In box. And who wants to do that? The specific number would be too depressing.
I thought I’d get to it during the holidays, since paying work was slow. I didn’t. And I don’t regret that, because I value the things I did instead during the holidays infinitely more.
In the early 90s, I thought email was an awesome invention — for about five minutes. By the turn of the century, it was eating my life — loudly, with its mouth open. I hate it with a passion.
Two days ago, I got ruthless and resolved to get up a couple of hours early each morning and make myself use that time — before breakfast, before coffee, even — on absolutely nothing but the mass destruction of email. At this stage, when all hope of having the time to spend paying attention to these thing was gone, I could justify glancing at messages fitting into one or two small categories, and slaughtering the rest. I was like Conan, interested only in crushing my messages, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentations of their senders!
And it took me only two days. I had predicted at least 10.
Now my In box looks like this, and it is beautiful:
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