It’s almost Halloween, so there is a particular meme I’m seeing a lot. What were we afraid of as kids? Freddy and aliens and shit. What are we afraid of as adults? A red badge over your email app with 25,832 unread emails.
Fair enough, that’s kind of a scary situation.
You could just trash all of them and start fresh. But could you really? If it were that easy, it wouldn’t be scary. You won’t, because there is probably important stuff in there — whatever important means to you.
In a recent episode on productivity on Syntax.fm, Scott and Wes got into talking about email and how to get through emails quickly. Wes was enumerating all the noisy emails he gets (not trash, just noise). How do they get through them quickly?
The joke ways: Ekey-Ekey-Ekey-Ekey
That is, repeatedly press the “E” key. That’s “archive” in a variety of email clients.
Hard same. Particularly when I have a bunch of email to get through, I’m just fast-archiving tons of stuff. I always pause-to-unsubscribe if it’s noise I don’t care to see again, but most of it I don’t mind, I just don’t need to dwell on right now, so Ekey-Ekey-Ekey it up.
How fast is one Ekey email? Maybe sub-1 second a lot of times, but let’s give it a generous 3 seconds.
Quick math…
25,000 * 3 / 60 / 60 ≈ 21
Three seconds for each of those 25k emails still puts us at 21 hours. Eeesh. 21 hours of raw work. Plus no guarantee it won’t just happen again.
I’m a fan of fighting the fight. That is, diligently unsubscribing from all noise and staying on top of email. But if I was looking at 21 hours of raw work, I think I probably would declare bankruptcy, and work on that diligence going forward.
You just gotta deal with the fact that you’re probably archiving an email of a crush you had finally expressing their feelings to you.
What’s the number, then, that you could deal with? I could probably kick through a couple thousand. I might even find that kinda fun in my own weird twisted way. But over 10k I’d throw in the towel I think.
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