I love receiving email. I created my first email account on Rediffmail about eight years ago. For about five years after that, email remained a novelty for me. I made ridiculous accounts with childish IDs and changed them as frequently as I did clothes. Instant messaging was the big deal at that time and, since I had been a student of an all boys schools all my life, getting to waste half an hour with a girl on IM used to be the high point of my day (yeah, lame, I know). Right from that time, all those years ago, I’ve had a deep seated love for those notifications that I had received a new email message.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that when I first read Joe Kissell’s suggestion over at Macworld that you should “empty your inbox”, I wasn’t exactly enthused by the idea of reading the entire article, which itself would only be the first one in a multi-part series. Despite my preconceived misgivings, however, I ploughed on and read the first article, and then the next one, and eventually the entire series. At the end of the day, Mr. Kissell had me convinced.
So, what changed? Well, for one thing, emptying your inbox doesn’t exactly mean getting rid of all your emails, never to see them again. As Joe Kissell so ably explains, it means sorting your messages, prioritising them, and filing them away into broadly categorised folders and deleting those emails that you find useless. Following this procedure, you’ll end up with an empty or almost empty inbox, and trust me, that’s not a bad thing at all.
Take my case, for example—I now have five folders for my emails, one each for the three publications I write for, one for all the important emails I may have to return to later (like software licenses and FTP login credentials), and another one for archiving all the miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t fit into either of the categories above.
These days, as soon as an email arrives, I deal with it and move it to its appropriate folder. If, for some reason, I cannot do whatever it requires me to at that very moment, I leave it in the inbox. Since I only have a few emails in my inbox at any given time, I know that they are important and have to be dealt with as soon as possible. No longer do I forget to reply to emails or overlook one of them because there were just too many to deal with.
Furthermore, the sparseness of my inbox has made my work a lot less stressful than it used to be. Where once I used to dread clicking on that stamp icon in the Dock, dreading being inundated by thousands upon thousands of emails, I now find it refreshing to just check out my email, do whatever it is I’m required to do, move all the emails out of the way, and revel in the sheer emptiness of my inbox. And since all my email is still there in all those folders, finding one of them takes less than a few seconds, thanks to the powerful searching features built into Mac OS X.
Since I was so hesitant to give this a try, I realised that most other people would be too, which is why I decided to pen down this essay detailing my apprehensions about the act and the satisfaction I gained after committing to it. I truly believe that Kissell’s idea of a clean inbox has a lot of merit and highly recommend that you give it a try too. If you do, let us know how the transition goes.
