Emails and efficiency
Thanks to my students, I learned that you can set up your unread emails to show up apart from and above your read emails in gmail (why yes, I am late to the party, where should I put my coat?). Having something like 4k+ unread emails in my box that have accrued over the years (primarily because I am both lazy and, on the occasions where I felt like getting rid of them, too damn easily overwhelmed to pick them out from the rest), I decided I should adopt this since it would let me find them easily. Sure enough, two days later, I have no unread emails in my inbox. Woo hoo!
It's not like all of these were important emails, mind you. Lots of them are store mailing lists that I want to stay on because I occasionally find something useful (but often don't). As I was clearing them out, though, it went fine back to 2011, and then jumped precipitously to 2008... and that was suddenly hard. I didn't have a lot of old spammy emails from back then; they were notifications from my son's little league team and knitting meet-ups with friends and stuff sent round to the LARP mailing list and emails from people I was sort of trying to date and stuff from old freelance projects... it was unexpectedly hard to let those pieces of correspondence go. I did, of course; none of it was something I needed to hold on to, nor was it anything worth archiving; they were the useful sort of thing that isn't terribly useful five years down the road. And yet... suddenly my inbox was filled with the names of people I used to see that I don't any more, and likely won't ever again on any sort of regular basis. I miss them, even if I don't say it often, and that missing surfaced hard today.
My inbox is clean now, though.
It's not like all of these were important emails, mind you. Lots of them are store mailing lists that I want to stay on because I occasionally find something useful (but often don't). As I was clearing them out, though, it went fine back to 2011, and then jumped precipitously to 2008... and that was suddenly hard. I didn't have a lot of old spammy emails from back then; they were notifications from my son's little league team and knitting meet-ups with friends and stuff sent round to the LARP mailing list and emails from people I was sort of trying to date and stuff from old freelance projects... it was unexpectedly hard to let those pieces of correspondence go. I did, of course; none of it was something I needed to hold on to, nor was it anything worth archiving; they were the useful sort of thing that isn't terribly useful five years down the road. And yet... suddenly my inbox was filled with the names of people I used to see that I don't any more, and likely won't ever again on any sort of regular basis. I miss them, even if I don't say it often, and that missing surfaced hard today.
My inbox is clean now, though.
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