coping with email overload
with just a few days left to the year, i’m wrapping up the last to-do things before i go on a year-end break. and with a lot of loose ends especially from my online tasks, i anticipate cramming until, or especially by, the end of this week. it helps a lot that i enjoy immensely what i am doing, otherwise, these would just be too tedious.
i’d be first to admit that i am not the most efficient person on earth. i have mastered the art of multi-tasking (the only reason why this household is not yet breaking apart), but i get easily distracted. sometimes, willingly so. but i’ve completely uninstalled yahoo messenger, and all it’s annoying accompanying programs from my pc, and my gtalk shows me permanently “busy”. so what’s my greatest distraction?
email… ahh, email! i have a love afair with email since 1995, when i was still using DOS based pathworks. moving to outlook took our relationship to another level, but we had a falling out when i had to rely on yahoo’s limited capacity. gmail re-lit the embers and kept the passion burning. gmail is my clandestine lover: keeps me company in the mornings, and when opportunity permits, the last i see before i turn for bed at night.
i’ve got 241 MB worth of emails sitting in my account and if not for gmail’s conversation feature, i would be lost in the roughly 900 threads (not 900 singular emails!) still unread, and filed away under different folders. there are still emails i have ben meaning to reply to for the last week, at least, but never got to, what with all the new ones coming in. i know i could use some tutorials in improving efficiency as i have no systematic way of attending to emails. i read personal messages first, most of the time, and i think i tend to reply to those stuff which can be settled quickly, and can therefore be archived and forgotten just as quickly. that’s assuming, i get to read it.
sometimes i’m tempted to do the select-all-delete maneouver. but i just can’t bear deleting them unread, even though i know a lot of those would be “junk” (but not spam, which get automatically screened anyway), a lot are one-liners, and a handful would contain just a smiley. but until i get these treshed out, i’ll simply have to let them accumulate and just to rely on gmail’s expanding storage space and hold on to their promise that “you’ll never need to delete messages!”
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5 Responses to “coping with email overload”
December 20th, 2005 at
i always delete emails from people i don’t know. if i didn’t know your email address, even if it should ring a bell when seen in my inbox, off to trash can it goes. sorry…but it’s better to be safe than sorry. still, i deal with having tons of unread emails, and then gets accumulated to overwhelming amount. i try my best to just spend maybe 15 minutes in the morning to go through my emails and another 15 before i go to sleep…but it seems like it’s never enough. i usually log off even with the knowledge that i was not done yet…i’d usually make a promise to open them later on and if needed, answer them. but no matter how loose my schedule becomes…i still end up with bunch of unread/unanswered emails.
December 21st, 2005 at
iba pa ren nga ang card na written in paper and ink… =)
ako na touch ako sa padala ng isang friend ko, ung isang card na na receive ko meron ABAKADA book for meg.. ung isa naman me naka ipit na chocnut… teeheee… =)
December 21st, 2005 at
baligtad tayo, des. i lurve emails! most of my emails are not unsolicited, except the (still) few spam emails i get. and even those, minsan binubuksan ko pa rin, and i derive a lot of amusement from them, haha! weird ko no?
December 21st, 2005 at
simplymuah, definitely! i blogged about that just recently. pero inggit ako sa card mo, ha…yung may choc-nut, hehe…
December 28th, 2005 at
I wonder how many of those threads are PINOYexpats conversations? Hahah! I know that half my gmail is PINOYexpats stuff!