I have this magic inbox. Granted, it’s not as exciting as magic beans, but bear with me.
On Friday morning, I had 1,380 emails in my inbox, 95 of which were flagged for action. I worked a full day Friday, from around 9.30am to 4.30pm. I did a few hours "catching up" on Friday night.
Despite this, I came into the office this morning to find 1,760 emails in my inbox, including 95 unread mails and a total of 97 emails flagged for action. Dark magic in action, friends.
My inbox grows when I’m not looking. For example, I just clicked away from my inbox to write this blog post. You can judge from the quality of the writing how long it took, but it wasn’t more than a few minutes. When I looked again, 18 new emails had arrived.
Granted, I was able to delete some of those emails pretty quickly because they were just a big fat waste of my time, and probably also the time of the person who wrote them (Natural Hydration Council? I’m looking at you right now).
But still, the magic growing inbox is becoming a big problem for me. Seemingly, nobody uses the phone to have a conversation any more. After all, why make a 5 minute phone call when you can generate 20 emails back and forth instead? Why pitch a story on the phone when you can send me a press release with two attachments?
And it’s not just email. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to keep my Twitter DM inbox below 800 messages these days. I used to spend some time every day deleting some of the messages one by one, but I got depressed by the pointlessness of this activity and gave up. Now I just use Tweetdeck so I can’t even see how many messages I have.
I’m getting increasingly pissed off by people who can’t clean their mailing lists. DWPub sends me every message six times. And they send quite a lot of messages, too. Gorkana sends me everything twice. Some PR agencies send me releases three or four times. Facebook keeps emailing me to tell me things I don’t care. And LinkedIn? Why would you ask me to endorse you if I’ve never met you or worked with you? Big. Fat. Waste. Of. My. Time.
Ugh.
So here’s my plan: ARMAGEDDON. I’m going to can my email address, my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, my Twitter account. The whole shebang. Social media suicide. And I’m starting from scratch. A lovely, serene, calm new inbox will be mine.
Just as soon as I’ve responded to those 97 outstanding messages.
