Monday, April 10, 2023

E-mail Scourge

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 ;)


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