Yesterday I found that having spent several hours going through a mountain of recent emails I still had almost 3,000 unread. They all dated prior to July 15, so I decided to do something naughty. I hit the Apple A command and deleted all of them, sight unseen. I can’t tell you how good this felt. I don’t know quite what was in there, although I’d guess about 30% was spam, 50% was things I’d opted into and 20% I have no idea. It’s possible that there was something important in there, but I figured if there was it would resurface sooner or later.
Next I’m getting rid of a load of RSS feeds and Google alerts, most of which seem to be compounding the problem of too much information rather than helping to solve it. Anyway, what was I thinking when I set up an alert for “Indian statistics”?
My overall aim here is to consume less digital media and to chew things over properly. This should leave more room for a few much bigger helpings of the things that I find especially tasty.
Stat of the day. In 2008, people in the US people consumed three times as much information as they did in 1960. Cerebral obesity? Perhaps not.
Richard – I used to work with a lawyer at a previous company who had an amazing policy dealing with his email twice a year (similar strategy to yours!):
http://blog.bradbox.com/handling-the-post-holiday-inbox
I won’t necessarily do it again but was fun!
Reminds me of someone I once knew who did a similar thing with his boss. Every few months they’d be a new urgent request or idea. He’d totally ignore them unless he was asked more than twice. What generally happened was a) his boss got fired/got another job, in which case the request/idea evaporated or b) the ‘urgent’ request/idea got thrown out or sidelined in favour of an even more urgent/better idea.