I am one of those people you hear about who has too many email accounts. My excuse is that I am interested in lots of different things: writing, book groups, following politics, poetry, general daily life stuff (think buying) and others. To help with organizing my activities (and my mind), I like to use dedicated accounts for everything. But I also get lots and lots of emails every day. Hence, my time-consuming problem. (And possibly yours!)
Keeping the accounts all cleaned out and up-to-date IS very time-consuming, and if I don’t work on at least some of the accounts each day, I am soon swimming in hundreds of messages I don’t have time to read – even if I might have wanted to. I need to keep up!
Looking for a way to turn this daily chore into a bit of fun, I discovered I could turn the whole thing into a game:
Wack-a-Mole with My Inbox
This game is so much fun, and satisfying – I’m thinking of making a board game out of it! Let me explain how it goes by picking one account as an example. Most of my writing is associated with lindathewriter@gmail.com, so let’s go with that one. I won’t bore you with a rendition of all the kinds of emails I receive, from scam, to spam to “ugh.” I think most of us are familiar with the characters that show up in our mail.
First, I open the account, and of course there are 3 different subtopics of division here: Primary, Promotion and Updates. Starting with the biggest, I search for the oldest messages which are still marked “New” by gmail (about 100-150 per day), and I begin working backwards – page by page. Once a section is done, I move to the others and repeat the process.
But how to decide what to immediately delete, or keep for later, or open now and read (and maybe change it back to “unread” so I will forget I already read that one and save it for a reread when I have time… ha ha).
People share things, they want things, they expect things, they suggest things and they even confuse me with other people! But there are gems hidden in the lists that I don’t want to miss. So, some of them I mark with the little star so I don’t accidently delete them later… they are items I plan to return to – maybe even read – when I “get some time.”
Once this is done, I am left with a “clean” set of emails in the account. Too many to actually read, but plenty to worry about since many of them probably NEED to be read!
Sometimes a second visit to the account is warranted and I can pick a few by “sender” to mass-delete… boy howdy, that feels great!
But of course new messages have shown up while I was doing all this, and I am tempted to make sure I “process” them before I leave. And occasionally, I need to visit the “trash” folder and delete everything there (and check on the spam folder for things I want but gmail thinks I don’t! Can I help it if some of my contacts seem flakey?)
- SIGH * Time to move on to the next account. And if did a meticulous job of cleaning last time, there are not as many pages to go through this time. If I keep up, this will only take 1-2 hours each day. If not, well… let’s just say, 6 hours later it ain’t pretty, and my brain’s pretty pickled when I get done with all the accounts! So that means “No social for you today, young lady!”
Well, I have to stop writing to you now. I have a bunch of accounts to clean up… time to have more fun playing…
Wack-a-Mole with My Inbox!
Wordz By Linda Bond 