Member-only story
My inbox is killing me
Email is evil and my inbox was full of demons, 250 of them. Getting them down to 10 may have saved my sanity. Here’s that story.
Here’s a friend link to read the rest of the story if you aren’t a Medium member.
My inbox was at 250 emails yesterday.
It’s now at 10. 🥳 🎈🍾
If you’ve worked with me before, you know that I think email was invented to destroy the world.
I don’t care how organized you are, email is where information goes to die.
Or to be hoarded by that one employee in the organization. You know the one. The email savant.
Me: “Wasn’t there an email about that?”
Employees whips out the paper version like a surgical nurse whipping out just the right clamp in the middle of the surgical emergency.
Email savant: “Here it is, from 1994 at 3:30 in the afternoon, originally written by Employee #3 who hasn’t been at the company in 20 years.”
I love that employee. They’ve saved me dozens of times from implementing something that was already a proven disaster.
But I still hate email.
Email is the antithesis of collaboration.
It is Enemy #1 of productivity.
It sits, smoldering in your inbox, waiting for you to do something. You open it three times a day because the subject line is so inane you can’t remember what it is. And the content is a thread 30 responses deep. What are you supposed to do with that again?
Anyway, I fell behind on the email treadmill.
And then further behind.
Until one day, I had 250 emails.
I pouted for a while. I grumbled for a bit. But mostly, I just kept opening my email and stressing over what might be buried in there that I was supposed to get done already.
