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Hoarders vs. Deleters- What Your Inbox Says
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.
Let's take people from two different extremes and generalize statements about non-extreme people from that.
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.
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Keeping your inbox empty (and generally being organized) is a skill that some people have naturally, and others don't. Those that don't, can learn it quite easily.
:-)
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.
A little advice, in work environment, keep every email and every reply so no one can fuck you over.
Linux O Muerte!
I don't understand what is unique to gmail here. You're saying you can find any message by searching for keywords - so can just about any modern mail client. I do this all the time in mail.app, and my emails aren't being scanned to present advertisements to me. Am I missing something here?
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.