On Monday, I arrived at work and felt as bad as I had in a month. I moped around a corner and came upon the office of my friend Aging Hippy Chick and looked in. Little did I know that all this was going to lead to first, me being cheered up, and then, to a discussion of email inbox full. And how to clean out your email inbox.
A Detour, Before We Reach The Dread Email Hoarder Topic
Aging Hippy Chick, or AHC (and yes, when I asked her what she wanted to be named in this blog, that’s the handle she chose) is a woman of a certain age, with mostly-black hair which is shoulder length and she wears ankle boots and silver jewellery.and describes both of us as “having been under-mothered.” As in, “when you’ve been under-mothered, like us, it always seems … ” fill in the blank. You’ve got problems.
Life sucks, I told her.
Especially on Monday morning, she agreed. When you’re working.
We talked about the whole getting older problem. “Maybe we should top talking about this,” I said. “Maybe we could just do like they did in the old days, and pretend we’re still 30.”
We stopped. We considered. I mean, it wouldn’t fool anyone, but we might confuse them. I mean getting older is not a fate worse than death, although it might seem that way to some people. What if you just pretended it isn’t happening?
I often think about Blanche Dubois in a Streetcar Named Desire going out to the bar after dark and her boyfriend Mitch saying “How old are you anyway? Why won’t you let me see you in the light … ” I discard the thought. I’m not willing to stay inside until after dark. Or spend the day in a bathtub like Blanche. Your skin would wrinkle up. Worse than it has already.
Two Midlife Crises
Maybe we should just not talk about age, I say to AHC. Maybe we should talk about writing.
I showed her my blog post on the Two midlife crises. We laughed a lot. She wondered how she ever got through turning 40. I said I guess you just keep breathing in and out. She said she would subscribe to the blog. And I felt better. A good laugh can turn your day around. And getting a blog subscriber, at my stage, is a victory.
Google Email Inbox … Full?
But then AHC needed to enter her email to subscribe. “Oh yeah,” she said. “We’ve got to use the work email. Can you believe, I’ve got so many emails on my Google account that they say I’ve exceeded the account’s limit. I have to delete some. I just don’t know where to start. Email inbox full, that’s what Google has told me. How can Google run out of space for old emails? I mean isn’t that why they call it Google, because it’s unlimited?
Apparently not. I told her about Brianna Weist, 101 Ways to Change the Way You Think, and getting to email inbox zero. And then I told her how I got rid of approximately 80,000 emails last summer. This is how you can clean up your email inbox full situation.
Email Hoarder No More: My Method
- Pull up a group of emails, maybe a month’s worth.
- Click the “select all” button.
- Go through your emails and unclick only the ones you want to archive. This would be 1) any that have personal significance, as in letters from friends and family. 2) any that pertain to important business, such as a settlement statement on a house you purchased 3) stuff you still have to take care of.
- This will leave only the junk email clicked. The junk email is comprised of: 1) sales emails 2) news emails 3) confirmation of orders (you can find those on the actual website if you need them, but if deleting them right away makes you nervous, wait a month, then delete) 4) routine banking info, etc (also, find on the business website) 5) political emails 6) new blog post emails (yes I get those too and I have two or three that I keep because I do read them 7) appointment reminders 8) links to old stories in the New Yorker, or similar paywalled journals. These are articles which you can’t see anyway because you’ve exceeded your free article for the month.
- Now delete everything clicked with the “delete all selected” key.
- Now go back and select “all” again.
- Now click “archive” and archive all the emails you did not delete because they are too important to delete.
- Keep doing this until you’ve gotten to email box zero.
- Don’t panic, if you accidentally deleted emails you want to save, go and get them out of the trash file, where they remain for some time, maybe a day or a month … but they won’t be gone instantly.
- And finally, after you’ve gotten to email inbox zero, when those mailing list emails start coming in, and you haven’t read the last three or four, ruthlessly unsubscribe.
AHC thought this sounded great. “That’s what I’m doing for spring break,” she said.
Are There Too Many Words in the World?
I thought about this all week. The concept of the email hoarder. That challenge of email inbox full. The idea, the very idea, that there are too many words. I’ve been keeping a journal on my phone for two years now, and I downloaded it and made it into a paper document and it’s over 1000 pages. Some of which just seems like so much dross, “did you have to write that down?” kind of stuff.
Sure, life is short. But also, as T.S. Eliot said, “Life is very long.” And when you write things every day, it’s a lot of stuff. As AHC can tell you, there’s a real problem with deleting the emails that someone carefully wrote and sent. They are spammed perhaps, but still, when you’re a words person, it hurts to delete someone, even a stranger. Even a greedy stranger who just wants your money. The fact is, in the digital world, it’s just too easy to write and send things.
Dan Buettner Declared a War on Words Once …
I am reminded of the author of The Blue Zones books, Dan Buettner, who said he went to a silent meditation retreat in Northern California where he wasn’t allowed to speak for 10 days. He said this experience of not being able to use the faculty of speech caused people to despair around the third day, and then they became disconsolate, crying, collapsing, wishing more than anything to leave the meditation compound so they could live like humans once again. By day five they were trying to escape, as gurus told them “you signed a promise to stay the course … No! we will not drive you back to town… “
It all sounded as if speaking is an addiction, like heroin. Perhaps writing is too.
Dan Buettner made it past the experience of being silent for ten days, and said it changed him.
Of course, as soon as he got out of the meditation compound, he started speaking, and writing, all over again. He worked for National Geographic as a writer and you know how wordy their articles are. And he wrote about ten books too. And I bet his email in box is full of spam. Although maybe like Brianna Weist he’s got control of it.
Email Inbox Full, But There Are More Words Than That …
Who was it that said “I am full of words?” Oh yeah, it was Elihu, Job’s young friend in the Bible. He was the one who said Job should accept his human limitations, both in terms of suffering and in terms of not comprehending God. I don’t know where that leads me.
Perhaps these words can lead me to acceptance of the need for email hoarding, for a time, followed by the need for email inbox zero. Because I too had to go through the process, and even now, I’ve got a thousand emails in my archive just from 2023 alone after I deleted everything I could. So I know I’ve got a good ten or fifteen thousand emails in the archive, which goes back to 200 . I’d better hope that, if I have to find one of the emails, I can remember who sent it, or the date, or a key phrase or I’m sunk.
Just for today, I’m going to leave those emails hoarded. I’m going to delete a few from this week … unsubscribe from a few lists … and be thankful for AHC. For being a good friend who’s always there for a good laugh.
After all, a good friend is worth more than any email I’ve ever seen.
Background Material: What’s Behind the Phenomenon of Digital Hoarding? from The Stylist.
You Might Be a Digital Hoarder If … from the New York Post