It's OK To Declare Email Bankruptcy!
I'll do it. You should do it too!
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Happy New Year everyone! Just gonna start this year off with just what bubbled to mind since it’s the 1st and I need to get back to work tomorrow. Also, I forgot to mention that my PyData NYC 2023 talk had been posted to YouTube and I kept forgetting to link to it for a month.
Some people are inbox-zero people. They diligently read/archive/snooze every single email that comes in so that the little notification thing on their phone or mail app reads 0. Many get a bit anxious when there are items in there.
I am very much not one of these people.
I have multiple inboxes between personal accounts and work. NONE of them are under 1000. My primary personal accounts have 2773 and 7126 “unread” items going back a decade+ respectively as of my typing up this paragraph. My work inbox is slightly more tamed at 807 because there’s active retention policies that delete emails after a certain number of years? (I dunno). The vast majority of these emails from subscriptions to various forums, mailing lists, announcements, etc. There’s also a bunch of notifications from various services and networks, and the inevitable promotional email from stores I’ve bought one widget from a decade ago. At work there’s the unending number of meeting invites, reminders, and giant 1000-person announcement threads. While I use filters and labels to mitigate a lot of the stuff I know I won’t deal with, a large amount does wind up in the main inbox area because I have some intention of at least scanning the subject lines.
I also use my email client for off-label tasks where I need a text box with memory. I’ll draft notes to myself, or send myself reminders. In effect, I treat my email inboxes exactly like how I treat my work desks at home and work — giant LIFO stacks of information and projects. I’ll often pluck off items that catch my attention and just let gravity pull the uninteresting stuff down into the lower depths of the inbox, never to be seen again.
So the natural question that many people have for me is… what do you do when you come back from a long vacation and there’s a hundreds of email just sitting in the box? How do you go through all of it?
And my answer is… I don’t. Most definitely not all of it, nor even a significant fraction of it. I’ll scan through the subjects looking for things that obviously need my attention and deal with those. For everything else, I’ll just declare email bankruptcy. [Mentally insert your favorite bankruptcy gif from The Office here].
Email bankruptcy can be done in a couple of ways. The most extreme and straightforward way is to literally just delete everything. Nuke it all from orbit and don’t look back. Just start fresh and new.
For data folk who probably feel deep objection in their bones in destroying data, a non-destructive way is to just dump everything into an archival folder. That way you can always go back and dig out a super important email that you missed. But still, archiving things away let’s you declare that you’re just not going to worry about emails prior to a certain date.
And then perhaps the least aggressive way is to be like me and just…. stop looking at email and just look for new stuff coming in. Let digital gravity do its thing naturally.
Surely you don’t get away with this…
Maybe not if you’re some important executive or manager where ignoring a communication might have irreversible ramifications. But for me and honestly, for many other people whose jobs aren’t to constantly coordinate between people, email exists as a way for other people to make transactional requests. This is especially true for data teams where we’re often providing a service to requesting teams. This means that if a request is important enough for a requester, they’re motivated to find you and follow up on any messages that might have gone missing.
And so, my experience has been that so long as you scan for anything that’s like “urgent/action required/due by xyz” you can probably get away with letting most stuff go. About the worst thing that happened to me was I once wasn’t paying attention enough and missed out on some emails talking about getting some free company swag t-shirts.
Plus, at the end of the year, most other people are away for holidays with family. Anyone sending important requests during that period should have the sense to know people are away and they should follow up later.
So if you’re like me and can’t stand maintaining an empty inbox, join me in the chaos and free yourself from the stress of “having” to catch up on a hundred emails.
How’s the move going?
So I’ve more or less decided that I hate Wordpress. I’m forced to use it to stand up tiny e-commerce sites since its one of the few inexpensive options in that space, but I will probably go on a murderous rampage if forced to write in it every week. The most popular newsletter plugins cost money to get important features like payments/subscription. So I’m gonna rule it out at this point.
I managed to sneak away for a half day and got a Ghost installation mostly running. That means subscribing test accounts, sending test emails, handling unsubscribes, handling payments. The UX is much better than WP so that’s already a plus. I’d still have to do a lot of fiddly testing, plus decide on design elements like logos and such, but it’s not too shabby.
But it’s not perfect because I came across some interesting bugs in the migration process… because of course I would. The current “import from Substack” tool in the Beta migrator UI has an amusing bug where it wont accept zip files from Windows machines, but will accept it from Linux or Mac boxes. It’s apparently some silliness around OS-level handling of sending MIME types regarding zip files.
I also came across another more important bug where Substack’s post export does something stupid with image URLs and confuses the migration tool, breaking the header image for 111 of my posts. That’s more posts than I’m really willing to fix manually. So I’ve got an active bug report for that submitted — and to the team’s credit, someone responded within a day saying they see a potential fix. Now I’m waiting around for that while handling other work.
Since I’m sorta taking notes about the process, I’ll create a detailed writeup once things are finalized. While at a high level setting one of these things up is supposed to be ‘simple’, there’s always so many fiddly little details.
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Guest posts: If you’re interested in writing something a data-related post to either show off work, share an experience, or need help coming up with a topic, please contact me. You don’t need any special credentials or credibility to do so.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise credited.
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