Death by Email

 

Ever feel like you just can't get on top of this?  It's startling to think that I have over 1 GB of work-related email now.  That is, of course, only one of my six or so various email accounts. 

How many messages do you receive per day?  How many do you process per day?  How many do you delete per day?  How much time do you spend doing this each day?

Interesting to look at the referenced article that is nearly 7 years old.  Not much progress here.  How can we get better?  What do you think? I'd be interested to know.

Email: too much of a good thing?: November 05,  2001 issue of New Thinking

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 20, 2008
  Hopefully, you have a lot of pictures.  1GB is 200,000,000 words.  Throw out about 50% for email headings (and other trash) and you still have 100,000,000 words.  At 600 wpm that would take you about 170,000 minutes or 116 days (24 hrs a day) to read your current email. Only suggestion I have, if you haven't done it already, is take your email off of any websites so that spiders won't spam you.  (that reduced my email by 80%) (of course, when your book comes out you're really going to get swamped)

• Anonymous
  October 20, 2008
  ...another stray thought. I remember when Bill Gates (he’s from Microsoft, lol) proposed that each email should cost a small amount.  Unfortunately, that comment was too far ahead of its time and people hated it.  Now that we are incessantly spammed, scammed, and losing bandwidth (to filtered emails we never see), I think that idea should be revisited.  Possibly charging a small (pre-paid) amount and erasing the charge if there was a confirming response.

• Anonymous
  October 21, 2008
  I delete all old mail with attachements one by one every couple months.   I also sort my inbox by "from" and delete the ones that are system status or spam every couple months. The other messages don't take up much space so I archive them to a PST after they are 120 days old.