Bankruptcy

To be frank, I don’t even know why I bothered to open my email client everyday. I had over 20,000 unread work emails that had amassed over the depression. I can’t even begin to count how many personal emails there were with all the newsletters and other subscriptions I have probably another 60,000. No wonder I had to start paying for Google storage space. While I had cleared my apartment from all the “doom piles” caused by my depression, my digital life was one giant “doom pile” yet to be tackled. According to this article in the NY Times, digital clutter can have a negative effect on your wellbeing as much as physical clutter can.

As the world would have it, I was starting a new job in a few weeks, so I didn’t have to REALLY worry about those work emails at that point as I would be starting fresh soon. There was however still the matter of preventing this from happening again and my personal email box to handle. YouTube to the rescue and I stumbled upon Carl Pullein, a productivity and time management expert who has helped, as he estimates, 60,000 people.

So using his method above, I could prevent things from getting any worse and from ever getting bad at the new job, but what did I do about the 20,000 and 60,000 emails you ask? I declared email bankruptcy. I accepted defeat. I said there’s no way any of these older than a month are important and moved them to an archive file called old inbox, processed those within a month using the system above and I was free. I felt lighter!

What got me stuck with so many emails in my inbox, because in addition to the 20,000 unread there were plenty of read emails in there too, was analysis paralysis. I’m not particularly good at folder structures – you should see my downloads folder. Deciding where to put something made me afraid I’d put it somewhere and never see it again, an ADHD trait – outta sight outta mind – I own 4 pairs of scissors and not for special uses like sewing. Carl freed me from that and basically said you’re going to use search anyways, might as well be searching your archive and not your inbox so you can see what you have to process. Search is search. And search is awesome so there’s no need for labels/folders. Whoa. I don’t need to categorize it to file it? I’m in! I do struggle to not do the 2 minute tasks at the same time I’m processing, however, my email volume is such that this isn’t an issue at this point in time. I am using Instapaper for newsletters that I want to read that come to my personal inbox and then using my reading time to actually read those rather than putting them in my action today folder. I highly recommend giving Carl’s content a glance as I’ve taken many of his courses and benefited immensely.