After all of fifteen minutes, my gmail inbox has gone from over 22,000 messages (or was it 22,000 unread messages?) -- to zero.
Since my first email in college (Telnet!), I have always diligently filed messages into folders and deleted any that were no longer relevant. And then gmail comes around, circa 2004, advertising: "With all the free space you'll have, never delete a message again!" and "With our incredible search functionality, never file into folders again!".
They said it, and I listened. And six years later, I now begin to periodically see messages of the previously unthinkable: "You have reached 96% of capacity. Delete emails now to prevent future emails from bouncing back to sender."
I feel duped.
Going down into memory lane, I begin to delete emails I no longer want or need. The process goes slowly; I barely get usage down to 95%.
And then at once, a clean start. Tyler archives my entire inbox (which, to be fair, he's been nudging me to do for a while now). Zero messages!!!! So clean! Relevant labels on the left, perfect for filing!!
It's amazing the momentum that a fresh start creates. No vendor is safe. The stores are the easiest -- wine companies, Bloomingdales, Fortunoff's (aren't you already out of business?), David's Bridal.
The whole unsubscribe process almost tells me as much about the company as the products themselves. Some vendors are no fuss and make it quite easy (Jet Blue). Others are a bit more manipulative, hiding the unsubscribe button and instead pushing you to switch from a weekly email to a monthly one (NYC event planners). Yet others can't believe you possibly wish to unsubscribe at all (David's Bridal: they don't just let you unsubscribe, but first they make you complete a survey for why you'd like to unsubscribe. Top on their list of checkbox options? "My wedding was postponed or called off." -- as if there is no other reason I possibly wouldn't want weekly reminders of random wedding to do's and sweepstakes like "win a free bachelorette to Vegas!")
The random email updates are harder... of COURSE I don't need Bon Jovi updates, especially here in India. But as I scroll down the email to unsubscribe, I find out he has a Foundation and he's been appointed by President Obama to serve on the White House Council on Community Solutions for his foundation's work on affordable housing. Where else am I going to get that information?
And then there are the aspirational email subscriptions -- newsletters around the latest business trends, strategic thinking, and going-on's in the microfinance world... the electronic versions of all the New Yorkers and Wall Street Journals lying around unread in my old apartment in NY. Different content, same guilt. The type of person I aspire to be would diligently read all of these mind-expanding articles each and every day. But that just doesn't happen in the busy-ness of day-to-day. Rather than feel guilty about this, in NY, I started to just rip out the articles that looked interesting (sacrilege!) and bring them to the gym. Felt a lot better than having unread issues piled up next to my bed. My friend Hunter said he'd always feel guilty the moment he picked up a magazine from his mailbox, because he knew he just wouldn't read it. My email inbox began to feel the same way. And so I applied my same thinking from NY. I starred all the ones that looked interesting, and deleted all the rest. I unsubscribed to most groups. The momentary pang of guilt was replaced by a feeling of empowerment.
A fourth category was anything NY related: Time Out NY, Daily Candy, you name it -- I originally wanted to keep these to continue feeling tied to NY. But I realize that all it did was increase the cognitive dissonance in my head. As much as I love Daily Candy, reading about the latest trends for poodle wear felt out of place with the work I do day-to-day. So those went too.
The result? 24 hours later, ten filters created and old messages labeled and archived. New messages (real messages) responded to right away and then immediately filed.
An empty inbox. It really is so beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment