After I sold CSS-Tricks, I get way less than half the email I used to. Relatively, it now feels absolutely trivial to manage my email. I don’t need any fancy techniques, organizing concepts, or special software to stay on top of things. I look at my email and just deal with it. I even get to keep my bad habit of reading it as it comes in with even less consequences.
But I just talked with a fella this weekend who is experiencing the exact opposite. He’s 3 months in to a new job. From a company of 100 to a company of 5,000. His inbox is completely loaded at all times. He even literally called it “spam”, even though it’s internal emails from real people from his own company. I have not experienced this personally, but it seems completely awful. Now you don’t have “email from my own company” as a metric for “important or not”. You’re back to needing to sift through the noise for the signal, and you have to because you’ll be bad at your job if you don’t. Ooof.
It’s amazing how big life changes effect your email life. I guess that’s no big surprise but it’s still interesting to feel it first-hand.
One response to “Current Role”
I have a similar problem in my current job in a very large organisation.
To manage this I have a folder called “Ignore Until Shouted At” and brutal filtering rules. Anytime a BS email makes it through to my inbox I add the sender’s address to the filter. Everything is deleted from the folder after 14 days.
I never look in that folder (just peaked, it has 430 messages!), and after 5+ years of doing this I have never had a problem. People will tell you if anything important is happening.