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I left the email garden to fend for itself, to grow weeds or bloom brightly without my constant tending to it. I chose not to worry about the steady rain of falling messages. I ignored the raging river of email rapids, and focused instead on other tasks.
The purpose was to chose my priority list and not have it chosen for me based on everyone else's needs as expressed with a missive directed at my inbox. It felt that my grappling with the email item, as soon as they sent it, made the items on their list take precedence over my own.
Reading my email, I concluded, was taking care of everyone else. I needed to take care of me for one day.
On an ongoing basis, I struggle to keep up with the steady email stream. On the surface, it's not overwhelming, it's continuous. It never lets up. It doesn't rest and it doesn't take a holiday.
At my previous job, as advertising sales manager, I oversaw a multi-million dollar budget. From my experience, one could conclude the larger the budget the larger the inbox. At one point I had almost 2,000 emails staring at me. I would console myself by looking over at the monitor of another manager and notice he never filed or deleted any email. Another manager had a whopping 15,000 emails, with 8,000 unread. Admittedly, 15,000 emails probably spells bigger problems than just email. It's like the person who hoards felines but doesn't take care of them.
My personal email would wax and wane depending on which inbox I focused on. I have more than one personal email account.
I'm not the only one.
A recent review of Quora revealed more than one personal email addresses is not unusual. Having only one probably is. Cody Riddar, Founder of Rebel Bits, admits to twelve. Currently 712 people are following the 'number of email address' topic. I would wager that those 712 followers are doing so to avoid their in basket.
Other Quora seekers discuss how many emails coming flying at them a day. That ranges from a low estimate of 130 for Lynette Young, a social technology specialist. She scans three accounts and actively handles or replies to about 40 emails. The remainder she usually skims, trashes or archives.
For others, the average email count is between 200 and 300. Trevor Dyster, reports 250 a day, with 50 directly work related and the remainder related to social media. He manages the influx by keeping his Blackberry switched off at night, which doesn't stop the email, just the email bleep. "Most get deleted as I follow them up through the various platforms."
Food blogger, Julie Niesen Gosdin, says two accounts is enough and she receives "probably 300" emails a day. Most of which "go into the trash."
The result of my 'one-day without email' experiment is inconclusive. I didn't end the day with a sense of satisfaction. It felt more like leaving a ticking bomb and I wondered how communicating became such an explosive device.
How do manage your email accounts?
How often does your inbox read '0?'
5 comments:
This makes me glad I have just one major account and a minor one I look at only occasionally. I felt stressed just reading about thousands of e-mails. And I felt angry reading about the person who never seemed to look at them. I wondered how many of the messages that seemed important to me when I sent them went to someone's e-mail limbo. Has making it easier to communicate made it tougher to get through?
Carolyn: I dread tabulating the many email accounts I have opened. They do, occasionally, make me feel good when I can get one down to a zero balance.
I am an outlier, I guess. I don't get much email. I do have multiple accounts. Two are for work, two are personal, and two are for registering at websites or ordering online. The spam filters on those last two are very aggressive, but the others are more relaxed.
My inbox shows "0" about 90% of the time. My work ones are most likely to show a few messages, usually one's I've read and then reset to Unread so they function as a To Do list. My personal email accounts get so little email (including spam) that it's easy to keep them at zero.
Of course, I subscribe to NO email newsletters. My social media settings at set to not send me email, except for new Twitter followers. Those I review quickly and if it looks like a person, I follow back until they prove me wrong. Otherwise, I check in at Facebook every few days and chat about a few things.
I generally pull back from anything likely to generate email. Google+ drove me away in a matter of minutes, mostly because it's just a ton of work, but also because of the messages showing up in my Gmail account despite my best efforts to turn that crap off. I've actively blocked other social media, like LinkedIn, because of its low-value/high-intrusiveness.
My feeling is this: I want email from people who are writing to me personally. Work, friends, readers: all good. Anything I get from at noreply@URL gets put in the spam filter (with the exception of online order confirmations). If I got 500 emails a day from humans, I'd be content. If I get 10 from machines, I go all rage-stormy.
Bill: your comment reminded me of what I call 'the wisdom of the Internet' emails. The ones that people fwd to their ENTIRE email database that shares some sweet story that makes you want to cry, or is full of pictures of kittens, but has nothing to do with the person sending the email and nothing to do with you.
I usually respond to those by asking to be removed from their 'fwd' list. I let the sender know I much prefer a personal email, even if it only says, "I was thinking about you, hope everything is going good."
The personal message is what has meaning to me.
(btw, hope everything is going good :-)
I've had to beg my mother to stop sending me that stuff. She acts all hurt, as if the cruelest thing a son could do is refuse to allow his only mother the chance to email him Photoshopped pictures of kittens and blistering, uninformed political screeds.
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