I am on sabbatical. I had not quite appreciated what all I can do while on sabbatical. A big goal was to organize. Mess and clutter, digital or otherwise are sources of stress and I wanted to remove some.
Last week I was offline (well mostly, please clap) and I let all the email pile into the respective email boxes. Email is a terrible way to do certain tasks and yet Universities etc have decided that all communication will be over email. So having a view of what all comes in during a given week was illuminating.
The vast majority are FYIs from automated lists.
The majority of which I rarely actually need to read. All I do is file/archive them. Informational content is almost zero.
Time to employ filters. This was the goal of the exercise. What emails can I safely filter? Most.
Improving my email signal-to-noise was one of the goals. Organize the folders various things go into. And I am adding relaxation to my post-vacation state. Email creep will happen again. But being offline nicely shows what can be filtered and what has actual informational or actionable value.
Time to email collaborators ;)
