Gmail – Inbox (1) – janssen
Anyone who has had the pleasure of living with me for any period of time knows that I am all about “The Right Way of Doing Things.” I assure you this does not get annoying at all (family members, it might be best if you just closed this window now before your eyes get stuck from rolling them around so quickly).
You might be surprised by how many “Right Ways of Doing Things” there are. For example, silverware must be put in the dishwasher prongs down (I live in terror of a fork prong going straight up under my fingernail – you’re all very welcome for that mental image). And bread goes in the refrigerator. Give me hard bread over moldy bread every day of the week. The bed must be made every day. These things are important.
And yet, “The Right Way of Doing Things” does not stop at housekeeping. Oh no. . .it extends so much further than that. (Flee in terror while you have the chance).
Email, my friends, can be done the right way or the wrong way. I use Gmail, of course, because it’s the best. And I archive all my mail. I cannot imagine leaving emails in the inbox, with the inbox count stretching out into the thousands.
The inbox is for emails that must be attended to. Once they have been dealt with, they can be archived away, never to be remembered again until you need to retrieve them for some piece of information.
Currently, my inbox has five items in it. There is an email from my mom about a miscellaneous item, a note from my former roommate where we discuss Christmas frolicking, nerts and Carmello bars (if that’s not a worthwhile email, folks, what is?), a powerpoint presentation I need to review, an article sent by a professor, and a link to a pdf file from my mother which I have not yet downloaded as I’m fairly sure that doing so will crash my computer, seeing as it’s a huge file.
I will respond, read, and download as necessary, and then archive. And then, my inbox will be gloriously, beautifully empty. All will be right with the world.
Do you empty your inbox or do you just leave it all in there?
I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND people who not only allow the number of emails in their inboxes to grow to the thousands, but who also have hundreds of UNREAD MESSAGES. Ugh. I can’t focus on anything else if my Gmail tab has a number on it, and the 20 messages currently in my inbox waiting to be appropriately recorded or responded to are stressing me out.
Um, so maybe I’m a little crazy.
Archiving is totally the inferior solution. I’m constantly replying a few days later to old e-mails. Why not have them close at hand? Newest are sorted to the top, so it’s not like it’s going to make me lose things–quite the contrary.
On the other hand, I currently have 438 new messages, so one might conclude I have a certain tolerance for clutter.
Huh. Contrarily, I *am* obsessive about completely cleaning my Google Reader.
Well, my yahoo account has well over five thousand now and gmail is at about 500. It’s not that I don’t agree with you, I just can’t commit. It’s probably because I am way more popular and get way more e-mails than you (hardy har har).
Oh and also, I’ve been meaning to blog about the silverware issue. I am with you all the way, but where Blaine comes from they have everything pointing up in the silverware tray so it will get “clean”. A) scared of being impaled B)you have to grab it by the part on which you eat and get it all dirty just to put it away. So we compromise and point knives and forks down and spoons up. Weird.
You’re not going to approve of this, but I wasn’t even aware of the archive button until RIGHT NOW.
The whole becoming a mom thing…something has to fall by the way side, and for me it has been email. I wish I could answer all of it, but I just don’t have time, so it just sits there. I can’t think about it too much or I start to hyperventilate, actually.
But I just don’t have to time to deal with it.
I used to be good (meaning, doing things the Janssen way) but a few years ago, I just stopped. I think it carried over from my job where my boss asks me at least once a day “do you have that email from…?” I look at my personal email as almost a journal so that’s why I hate the idea of getting rid of a lot of it. I do move stuff into subfolders but not often enough.
You and I are the same person. And, honestly, that delights me.
I didn’t even know you could do that! I have like 5 email addresses, so none of them get too cluttered. But I’m going to try and start doing things the right way for now on.
I must archive everything. It drives me crazy to have my e-mails pile up. I even wish there was a way to archive e-mails into sub-folders. Honestly. You should really see the way my “My Documents” folder is organized.
oh and re: silverware, I started mixing mine up after I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how silverware cleans better when it’s not all uniform/pointing the same way. Never doubt the WSJ!!
i am a semi-emptier. ten or more in my inbox simply stresses me out. i am definitely an archiver. i heart gmail!!
oh and as for the silverware thing….i face them down too because the water is the strongest from the bottom!! did that makes sense?? in my head it totally makes sense 🙂
I have no interest whatsoever in any way in archiving my mail. None. If it is new, then I attend to it right away. If I read it with the intent to attend to it but don’t attend to it right away, then I mark it as unread so that I won’t forget it. Things that I refer to a lot get starred. I have 3,974 items in my inbox. Come to think of it, I might have started archiving not to long ago and then got bored and quit. I didn’t want to archive all of it.
And you taught me the proper way of putting silver prongs down. I’m not afraid of getting impaled, I just don’t want anybody’s hands to touch the eating-off-of part. Defeats the purpose of washing the darn things.
Whoever is last out of bed makes it. That is Eric, and that is why the bed doesn’t get made. Drives me a little crazy sometimes and I just make it anyway.
And dude. BREAD! This is something we can never agree on. If you eat a lot of sandwiches, there is absolutely no need to put bread in the fridge. You will eat that loaf long before it gets moldy. If it takes you a while to go through a loaf, I guess you have to refrigerate it. We buy about four loaves at a time (because we eat so much), and usually two loaves go out and two stay in.
Normally I just respond to your blogs via chatting, so I felt like I owed you an especially long comment. 🙂
Oh, lord. My inbox is a great farking mess. There are 217 unread messages in it right now and that’s not because I haven’t read them. It’s because I skimmed them and left them there. Sometimes it’s useful to be able to go back but mostly it’s just that I read and run and don’t have time to think about what to keep and what to delete.
Okay everyone. This is a computer. It contains everything in a very small space. It doesn’t really matter how much stuff is there until you fill up the available space. There isn’t any paper cluttering the desk. You can find things with a couple of clicks and by typing a couple of words. You can sort and not make a mess. Please continue reading 😉
Now that I have said that, I don’t archive, but I do have a folder and sometimes sub-folders for each friend, family, and/or subject in My Documents on my hard drive. If it is important, I also keep a paper copy.
Why? Because I’m complusive? Sometimes. Actually, I do genealogy, and I do books for my husband’s business. It is how I keep track everything. A hard copy is the proof/documentation needed.
I never completely trust a computer. Hard drives crash and backups fail. Yup, they sure do. Just ask anyone who has just downloaded all their pictures and lost them – never to be seen again.
Now, if all the paper filing was done as neat and organized as my computers…
OH DEAR.
Once upon a time I made a New Year’s Resolution to keep my work email inbox under 200. RIGHT. That’s working out REALLY WELL for me.
funny cause Dan uses those exact words: “the right way” of doing something. Which is mostly a joke referring to his mom’s similar infatuation. BUT, I overall am not that kind of person. He archives. I do not.
You would cringe at the sight of my inbox. But on the other hand, smile at my forks.
Can I be an inbetweener? The number of emails in my inbox is an indicator of how out of control my life is at any given time. I like to keep it like you do but sometimes I get a little behind. I absolutely cannot have unread emails though.
I don’t even know what the archive button in gmail does. . .however I read all of my messages, I can’t stand to have my inbox at any more than 3. Somewhere along the way I missed 3 messages and they will remain unread forever. When I see 4 (which has become my absolute favorite number) I know that I have a new email.
At my first full time job I’d get a lot of trivial emails that could be deleted right away, so I was used to be work email inbox being 0. Then, at my second job, I realized that deleting emails was a big no-no, so I had to get used to having hundreds of emails in the inbox. At first it drove me absolutely nuts, but eventually I got used it it. (I tried to folder, but it wasn’t always possible to put an email into one catagory, so I just relied on my search function.)