In what has to be seen as a huge accomplishment for me, prior to leaving for vacation I actually managed to clean out all of my inboxes for all of my e-mail accounts. This is pretty exciting, actually. I have an inbox for my day job and another one for my website company – plus I have a third one for my teaching gig at the local university. Then I have my two personal inboxes which are perpetually filled with messages that I need to address.
E-mail inboxes are a pain in the ass. Sometimes I get into the office in the morning I don’t even open up my inbox for the first hour or two because you can get so bogged down in answering e-mails. The negative aspect of this, though, is that you get backed up with your messages like I was for the last few months. However, I spent a great deal of time before leaving for vacation just sitting behind the computer and answering all of the messages that were building up – from the mundane to the important.
The worst part about letting the messages build up, though, is that sometimes you have an important message that gets lost in the mix – I hate when that happens. Anyway, since this entry is rambling at this point I’ll wrap it up. I just wanted to say that I was glad to get my inbox cleared out. It’s like having a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders so I suggest that if you get a chance, you try to spend some time cleaning out your inboxes, too!
I have a really bad habit of letting email pile up. I have done a good job of consolidating a few personal email addresses all to one single Yahoo account. My biggest gripe is that I subscribe to a few mailing lists. When they come, I don’t always feel like looking at it, so I keep it and plan to look at it later. As a matter of fact, I do that with regular email too, as I’ll read it then plan to reply later that day. It’s easy to forget because a few hours later when I check it, another batch of new mail has come in and I forget about the stuff from a few hours ago.
The situation at work is even worse. Each individual address is connected to a “catch all,” meaning an email sent to one person goes to everybody’s email inbox. Coming back from a weekend, or worse, a three-day weekend, I’ll have 150 or 200 email messages, sometimes with only a handful meant for me, or none of them at all.