URL: http://www.womenentrepreneur.com/2009/06/help-i-have-10000-emails-in-my-inbox.html
I've been thinking a lot about e-mail management lately, mostly because my e-mail has been out of control for far too long, and it is finally beginning to hurt my productivity and communications. The fact that it took this long--three years--to hit the wall is probably nothing more than a testament to my perseverance in the face of adversity. But when I saw that my inbox read 10,388 e-mails, I knew something had to give. And that's not counting more than 3300 unread ones, many dating back to 2005.
I've blogged about my e-mail dilemma before, most recently on a client's blog here, as well as posting about mail applications such as Postbox.
One of the real catalysts for rethinking how I've been using e-mail has been the blog post Zero patience? You can still have inbox zero by Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal.
I'm terrible at following instructions, so I've resorted to spending half an hour archiving all but the last five pages of e-mail in my inbox, just systematically going to the oldest e-mails in Gmail, selecting All, then hitting the Archive button. There is something frightening and liberating about this exercise.
The hardest part of archiving old e-mails that I haven't properly filed--much less old e-mails that I haven't even read--is that I'm always worried that the minute it is out of sight, I'll miss out on something critical. But if I haven't addressed it in three years, the other side of my brain reasons, how in the world can it be important?
Another aspect of ridding my inbox of e-mails is that I tend to be a collector. OK, I'm a hoarder. I have tons of e-mail newsletters that I've saved for several years now and haven't gotten around to reading. But I just KNOW I'll need that certain issue of TechCrunch or that e-mail newsletter from June 2007 from Absolute Write. And without it, my collection is incomplete. Welcome to my crazy world.
I have to remember that digital newsletters are like the magazines I used to hoard--boxes and boxes of The Sun from the past 11 years, Real Simple even after I stopped subscribing, The Oxford American even after it stopped publishing, Everyday Food even when it suddenly stopped appearing in my mailbox--and more. I finally threw out most of them (OK, I still have issues of The Sun and Everyday Food) and it was liberating, although I did get a message from my trash company that I had to separate bulk magazines into several extra bags as the weight of the magazines kept ripping the heavy duty garbage sacks I had dumped them into.
I have yet to find that I've needed an article in any magazine I've thrown away. And even if I did, there are online archives for many publications now that render the paper version nearly obsolete.
So the fact that I've hoarded my e-mails since I first began using Gmail isn't a surprise. I'm just surprised at how long it took me to take action. Then again, the first step to any addiction is admitting it--and I think I did that quite openly in my recent e-mail confessions.
What state is your Inbox in? What have you done or are you going to do about it?