Do you record your phone calls, archiving them by dropping the tapes into a shoebox on your desk?
Like that one to your mum from last Sunday, when all she did was complain about her boss and your only response was, “That su-ucks.” Did you? No. Of course not. But if it was an email exchange, it’s probably sitting there growing mouldy along with the 15,000 other emails in your inbox.
Why? Because you are ill, that’s why: sick with indecision and unable to muster the energy to just get rid of what you don’t need. Luckily, you have me. And my inbox has…let me just check…eight messages.
I’m appealing to you in the spirit of personal betterment, here. My credo: Hit the mo-fo delete key, yo.
I’m not saying I’m better than you because there are eight…no, wait, I can actually delete that one…seven messages in my inbox. But I kind of am better than you. I have alleviated the psychic weight of the inbox from my life. It’s either act on it or get rid of it with me. And that’s liberating. Like running naked on the Common, minus the fear of being arrested or being bitten on the arse by a dog (er, perhaps that’s not exactly what I’m getting at). Anyhoodle, I’m at one with the inbox, master of my digital domain.
Listen, you need to keep some messages, such as contracts, promises to follow up on, that kind of thing. But you want to keep everything else. Why? Just so you can keep track of your “What did you do on the weekend?” to “Rented Weekend at Bernie’s II” trail of a conversation with buddy in the next cubicle?
Stick the keep-worthy missives in a reference folder, out, out of your inbox. Friggin’ chuck the rest.
This is the hardline message of Mark Hurst, who wrote the essay “Bit Literacy” in 2000 (and turned it into a book of the same name this year). In 2000, Hurst, who refers to email and all other digital info as “bits” and its management as “bit literacy,” wrote that people must work on “letting go of as many of the bits as we can. Bit literacy allows us to clear a path of emptiness through the jungle of bits that surround and distract us; the emptiness allows us to see.”
Right on, brother.
The cluttered inbox is a cluttered mind, all clogged up and constipated with the inane. And worse, it’s the inane shoulder-to-shoulder with the important, the keep-able, the needed. How can you ever manage like that? It’s like a hospital emergency with no triage.
And, truly, the gunked-up inbox is a disease. It’s the inability to let go. It’s lazy mass accumulation masquerading as control, as the ability to draw up so-called crucial information at the click of a mouse.
If you’ve got more than a day’s worth of messages in your inbox, you’re holding on. But, to what? You can’t take these things to your grave—unless you plan to have them printed and a funeral pyre set beneath you with the fuel of a lifetime of “I’ll get back to you with the info ASAP!!!! : ) : )” messages to light your passage.
Let it go, dudes. Ditch the lot. Today. (Because, like, if you have 20,000 emails in there you can’t reasonably go through them to ferret out the 100 you actually need.) Trash them all. Start afresh. A new digital day awaits. And you and the inbox can finally be one.
Trust me. This is a cult you’ll want to join. (Running naked around the Common optional.)
Go ahead and add to my inbox, I can handle it: lezliel@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2007.
I hate the delete key. I despise it. As a resident techie for my friends and family I often have to deal with things that people deleted by mistake. “Isn’t there a way to get it back?” Too often people delete too early. While physical storage is expensive, digital storage is dirt cheap. If it is difficult to get back deleted items but painless to keep them then why delete? I haven’t deleted one of the 14118 emails in my Gmail account going back to March 2005. I still keep a clean Inbox. Rather than hitting a delete button I hit the “archive” button. All my clutter is out of sight but I can retrieve it instantly with a search.
So while I agree wholeheartedly with your advice to keep a clean Inbox I hope none of the people I offer tech support to follow your delete advice. Because sooner or later I’m going to be called to help them retrieve something they deleted too early.
Beat you Lezlie. Only 3 emails in my inbox.
But there are tens of thousands elsewhere in my email system because I file them appropriately for later use. I use email as my filing system, as my memory, as my backup for life. But the key word in that description is “use”. You have to think about it, not just brainlessly leave everything in the inbox, or (‘scuse my bluntness) brainlessly delete everything.
Email is a tool. Learn to use it, or let it use you — your choice.