SEPTEMBER 26, 2008

I Surrender. Email, You Win.

I recently identified the single biggest source of stress in my life. No, it’s not the work/family balance. It’s not the status of my retirement savings, either (though that may be because I haven’t looked at my account balances since the collapse of the banking industry this month). It isn’t even the terrorism-global warming-general state of disaster trifecta that the world is currently facing.

No, the biggest source of stress is my complete inability to keep up with email.

My work email, for one, is out of control.  Yes, I know it’s a cliche these days to complain about how many emails you get - people seem to trumpet those numbers like battle wounds. (”I went to lunch yesterday and came back to 200 new emails!”)  But the reality is that the amount of email we all send and receive is exploding. Some days, I don’t actually do any work - I just respond to emails, half the time asking other people via email to do things, and the other half trying to find the right folder to file away the rest of my emails so that I can find them later, when I do finally get to the work.

But my problem goes way beyond my work email. There’s my personal gmail account, which is connected to my blog, and which seems to expand exponentially every week. Gmail has its good points, but the fact that I can’t move emails into files doesn’t help my mental state. The number on the inbox never goes down, it only goes up.  Getting through that account is a never ending task.

And now there’s Facebook. I get messages on Facebook, plus comments on my status and posts on my wall. That’s three separate places for me to accumulate unreturned email, all of which need to be checked individually. Don’t get me wrong - I am not complaining that people are contacting me. I am grateful to friends who take the time to get in touch with me, and I am happy to hear from them. I just get stressed about when I will find the time to write them back.

Unclutterer has some advice for how to get email under control. This is my favorite piece: “Starting right here and right now, you’re going to process your email as it comes in, and as you’re done with each message, you’re going to either delete it or file it away in a folder separate from your inbox.” Great advice - if you can follow it. But if you’re reading email on the road, or you work part-time, then this is tough to adhere to. For one thing, deleting emails on my Blackberry doesn’t delete them on my desktop, so I can’t delete-as-I-go.

Here’s some even better advice:

Ask yourself: if an email is older than a month, does the sender really still expect a response? Be honest. Most likely, the answer is no. If it was that important, the sender probably contacted you again more recently, or using another method. This may seem scary to some folks, but I recommend taking all the messages older than a month (or even two or three weeks, for the brave!) and simply moving them into your email archive.

That definitely does take some nerve.

Missionary Geek, who says that most of us feel “vaguely sick” when we look at our inboxes, also has some recommendations for how to keep them under control.

Unless I do something drastic - and soon - I am in danger of email meltdown. What do you do to keep your inbox under control?