During last week's small group meeting, my co-leader asked me if I had seen a particular video. I remember it coming into my inbox, but confessed I had not reviewed it. I went home later and looked and there it was, buried four days back - along with a week's worth of incoming e-mail.
Suddenly I was struck by a thought: What if I opened none of my e-mail for a day? How much what I get? What is important?
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Like a great many people, I have a multiplicity of e-mail addresses.
I of course have my work e-mail address, which has varied across every company since I first started in the biopharmaceutical-medical device industry (which started, of all places, in Lotus Notes). The addresses have changed over the years - first name.last name, last name.first name, first name (for companies that are very small), last name.initial - but they are ultimately all short term, disappearing as soon as my time at the company has ended.
I have a second e-mail, the e-mail associated with this site. Other than appearing here, it is located almost nowhere else. The incoming e-mails there are few and far between, appropriate for an address which is only for contacts.
Google insists that I have an e-mail associated with this blog as well that I never use. I have another Google address as well, mostly because my family members want to share documents. I never use this except for family related comments.
The last e-mail is my public address.
I have this one the longest, probably since the days when AOL started to not be a thing and I needed a back-up. It is now one of the addresses that people look at and are surprised that it even works anymore - not quite "yahoo.com" in its antiquity, but almost as old.
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For the experiment, I did not open or delete any e-mails for two 24 hour periods. The tally was such:
Main E-mail Address: Day 1: 32 e-mails, Day 2: 15 e-mails. 47 e-mails total.
Spam/Junk E-mails: Day 1: 14 e-mails, Day 2: 9. 23 e-mails total.
Most of the main inbox e-mails were "legitimate" - in the sense that they were things that I had signed up for once upon a time; there were only four that were truly "junk". They were a mix: some SubStack notifications for SubStacks I occasionally read, a couple of notifications from the Community Garden, a receipt for my taxes, and some e-mails from the good folks from Permies.com.
The rest? Notifications that really are advertisements from sites that I have visited at one time or another and either purchased something from or signed up because I wanted the initial 10% discount, although I ended up not purchasing anything from them. All reminding me that something was for sale now, and I needed only to click through to buy something else.
Of all of those e-mails, only a handful were really "needed".
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I have started the process of unsubscribing. Some sites make it easy; some sites make it much more difficult. And some take time. But I will continue to work through them as they continue to come in. Given where I am in life, I scarcely need more e-mails reminding me that there are things out there that I "need" to buy.
Will I ever reach the plateau of no e-mails? No, there will always be some I should have; my goal is less than 10 a day.
Because of all things that take my time, checking my personal e-mails should not be one of them.
No e-mails TB? Boy, there's a shoot for the moon goal. I've noticed the number of spam e-mails climb higher over the past year, not a good trend.
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - No e-mail can be accomplished. It more or less happens at the e-mail I use for this account. Beyond the folks that have reached out here over the years, I get notification from a single Substack I signed up using it. It is the same for my Google related e-mail account as well; no spam or sales e-mails to speak of. Keeping it off the InterWeb at all seems to be the key.
DeleteI will say that my general e-mail box does a pretty good job at scrubbing most spam e-mails. It does make it very clear, however, that these are either being sold or stolen.
I used to have several gmail accounts to try to keep my emails sorted by topic (in hopes of making the volume more manageable). Then google started closing those accounts and wouldn't give them back. Fortunately, there are plenty of free email options out there.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, what an interesting concept! I have been pretty happy with Protonmail.
DeleteThat said, this whole experiment convinces me I need to be better about putting myself out there at all.
I guess I have always been pretty fastidious about emails. I generally check my emails via my phone several times a day and delete those that I no longer need to see again. Once a day, usually in the morning, I go to my office downstairs with a desktop and deal with any emails that need to be dealt with and then file them in the appropriate folders. I only have gmail email addresses these days and it does such a great job of detecting spam, I never look at the folder so I don't get that many emails in a day. Maybe a dozen or so in our main account that I share with my spouse and maybe three or four in my personal one.
ReplyDeleteI am also quick to unsubscribe from emails, especially those that follow ordering something online and despite unchecking the box asking if I want further communications.
My inboxes are always nearly empty and thus I treat what emails that are there more of reminders of something requiring my attention. I always shudder at seeing inboxes with hundreds of emails sitting in them.
Ed, I am Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in this account. At work, I am very much as you describe. I move e-mails out of my inbox via deletion or organization as quickly as I can; I try to have no more than 20 e-mails in there at the end of the day, mostly ones that I need to act on.
DeleteMy personal e-mail, on the other hand, is a disaster. I tend to save things I intend to "get back to", and then seldom do. Beyond unsubscribing to everything unilaterally that I do not need, that is the next task.