Declaring Email Bankruptcy
I’ve decided that I’m going to declare bankruptcy on my inbox sometime this week.
What’s a bankrupt inbox?
Well, since I am now 12 hours off from most of the continental US there is virtually no chance for me to catch up on emails as speedily as I used to. Waking up every morning with over 100 unread messages has gotten just too overwhelming. My current Gmail inbox is sitting at 1722 unread messages.
How am I going to do it?
I’m going to take every message outside of the 100 most recent and just archive them. If i haven’t gotten to them by now, I probably wont.
Next, I’ll go through the 100 remaining emails and either respond, delete, archive, or take some other kind of action. No skipping around.
After that, whenever an email comes in that doesn’t require immediate action, it doesn’t need to hit my inbox. I’ll continue to refine my filters etc.
The most dangerous part of trying to keep growing in ventures online? Getting bogged down and flooded.
Low Signal to Noise means Low ROI…
Anyone have any insight to add or guides they know of about declaring bankruptcy on your inbox?
March 30th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
I find it ironic that I was just grappling with a similar problem, and had in fact I had started to write a post about it on my own blog, when you published this post.
Right now I am in the process of filing all promotional emails and subscription emails into a “Subscriptions” label, and setting Gmail to “Skip Inbox” on them. When I have handled my vital emails, and if I have some breathing room, I will look at my “Subscriptions” emails. I might also create a “Favorite Subscriptions” label so that I am less likely to miss the ones I want to see.
Yesterday, sitting at my laptop I found myself suddenly exclaiming (to the amusement of my neighbor at the kitchen table) “Stop it! Leave me alone! I don’t want your free stuff!” and closing all my browser windows.
March 30th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
never heard the term e-mail bankruptcy, but I think I have declared it a few times already. I have almost stopped all except the most important subscriptions. that helps! I delete lots without reading them at all. not polite, but if in a hurry, I am looking for the most urgent or friends and family ones. I am sure I have missed important information, but…….I don’t know it, so I don’t miss it! right?
March 31st, 2009 at 11:31 am
The first thing to do is look at all of the subscription emails you’ve got, and un-subscribe from them. If they are from a valuable source, then go find the appropriate RSS feed, and subscribe to that using Google Reader instead. I find RSS feeds are a lot easier to manage and the items easier to ignore.
Next, sort your inbox by sender*. This makes is easier to see emails from mailing lists; look at each sender, give a quick scan of the subject titles for anything interesting, and then select them all for deletion. This technique will also help you find emails from friends, and setup appropriate filters.
* The only problem is, Gmail doesn’t seem to have a function for sorting by sender. The alternative approach is to look through ‘All Contacts’, and look at the recent conversations for the interesting/important ones. Or, use an external IMAP client, like Outlook Express.
Hope that helps…
thefluffanutta
March 31st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
While clearing out, I like to sort emails by sender. Some senders are just more important than others. This gathers all of a companies emails to be together, so I can see what’s important and wipe the rest out. Often I can get rid of everything from a single person/company quickly and easily without having to mentally process every one.
March 31st, 2009 at 3:14 pm
I use tons of filters. Most companies I get emails from all have their own folders they fly into.. helps keep the inbox clean of everything other than social messages
March 31st, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I cured myself of the 100+ daily emails by ruthlessly culling emails from those individuals/companies/blogs/ that I had filed but not read. If I haven’t read the past 10 updates/news from them – out they go.
You have to be ruthless!
What emails are coming by subscription? Do you need them all? When did you last read a subscribed email?
April 1st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Darren Rowse wrote about how he dealt with it. I think his approach was basically the same as what you’re thinking about.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/04/10/from-10000-to-0-emails-in-an-inbox-in-24-hours/
April 2nd, 2009 at 3:42 am
This usually just happens to me when I am on vacation. I use a pop3 program, presort them by sender, and delete a lot of those simply by looking at the headlines. So much spam out there, it’s sickening, I would not have an idea how to deal with such an amount of serious mail without auto responder or hiring someone to do it.
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:44 am
I use filters, labels and COLOR in gmail. I have colored everything I must see. It pops right out at me, and otherwise I don’t need to even bother looking at it.
I scan through the subject lines, but don’t really open anything that is not in color.
I also went through and unsubscribed from almost everything I had coming in. Past the first few emails and it’s mostly sales anyway!
I added RSS feeds for sites I like to keep up with. That way I can scan for new posts, and not have my in box so full.
good luck~ it’s some kinda task I tell ya!!
Jackie
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:17 am
I have a lot of my filters set to only allow emails from certain groups or people into my box. I also unsubscribed to many of the lists whose emails I never read. I still get wy too much email, but it doens’t drive me crazy anymore.
Hope you work something out.
Bette
April 5th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
So I’m probably a little odd here, but I have different e-mail addresses, and I use different ones for different things, plus I use filters to automatically sort my e-mail into folders. Friends/family go one place that I look at right away, anything related to Squidoo goes someplace else, which is the second thing I look at, and newsletters are sorted by which e-mail I used to sign up.
Works exceptionally well for me most of the time.
Now if it was only so easy to keep my Twitter DM box clean and sorted, LOL.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
The Angels basecamp has been very active lately! We get an email for every post made there and you wouldn’t believe the amount of emails in one day! OMG! Anyway, I finally notice where i could unsubscribe to those emails!! Now I just go visit once or twice a day and it is so much better!