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What Does Your Email Inbox Say About You?
By JLP | August 17, 2006
Here’s an interesting article by Jeff Zaslow titled Hoarders vs. Deleters: How You Handle Your Email Inbox Says a Lot About You I found in the Wall Street Journal. I thought this statement was interesting:
“If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways,” says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. “Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?”
Okay, I have to confess: at this time I have 1,074 messages in my inbox. I’m not “holding on to them.” Rather, I’m just lazy! I’m usually pretty good at responding to important emails. I’m just bad at deleting the stuff I don’t need.
What about you? How emails are in your inbox?
Topics: Organization, Personal Growth |
August 17th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
I’m the exact opposite. I read, and then either delete or file to an appropriate folder. It’s almost OCD for me - if I have things lingering in my inbox, it stresses me out!
August 17th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Several thousand. I tend to reply immediately, and use “Mark Unread” as a way to keep track of emails that need attention. Moving emails to subfolders always seemed to be more trouble than it’s worth, particularly if I need to hunt down an old email by doing string searches.
August 17th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
This is actually an interesting question from software design: do you “accept the metaphor”? Having grown up with email readers that are organized as databases and search engines, I’m used to dealing with them this way.
If you learned about email readers as a metaphor for organizing paper mail, you’re more likely to pay attention to things named “inbox”, etc.
August 17th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
3264 in Inbox alone, and then I have about 20 other folders.
August 17th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Work email? I try to have nothing. Home email? 1K+. But I do try to file that stuff away eventually.
August 17th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
I have several email addresses. I use a separate one for each client and use them as a sort of filing system. I write down anything I don’t want to lose, but I keep most every email that isn’t junk. It has been valuable on many occasions - I have been able to track down people I needed to, keep in touch, etc. I’m not the most organzied..so for me that IS organized! LOL
August 17th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
18 on my personal email
18 on my work email (coincidence:)
8 on my blog email
G-mail is fantastic because you can archive all emails and then use search mail to find anything you’ve kept hanging out in archive land. That may help all of you folks who just can’t delete anything. Just a thought:)
August 18th, 2006 at 2:18 am
My personal email has around 10 messages in it, and my work email (where I get a lot of messages) is at 205 messages. Though I regularly sort it. I keep all my messages (only delete spam or pointless ones) and use a program called ClearContext to organize them. I scroll down the list, make sure all the threads are tagged for a topic, click a few buttons, and they’re all filed away. Clear it every few days when it gets to 200-300 messages (so I’m due now, I guess).
August 19th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Weekly Roundup - 08/18/06
Here’s a quick rundown of some posts that caught my eye over the past week…
JLP wants to know what your inbox says about you. Me? I have 2119 messages in my inbox. Just like JLP, I ascribe this to laziness (and a healthy dose of being ove…
August 19th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
[...] AllFinancialMatters wonders what your email inbox says about you. Free Money Finance says a high starting salary is worth $1 million and is frustrated with an issue with his elliptical machine from Sears. [...]
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:34 am
When I first check it after leaving it idle for a few hours, I tend to have a couple of hundred messages…overwhelmingly spam. (And yes, I filter aggressively. This is what gets through the filters. If I didn’t filter, I’d have gotten 16,752 spams since last midnight…and that was less than six hours ago.)
When I’m finished checking it, it’s always (and I do mean _ALWAYS_) empty. Every message in my main inbox is either dealt-with (responded to if it’s personal and requires a response, saved in another file if it’s personal and doesn’t require a response, or moved moved to its correct location if it’s a mis-delivered list message) or deleted, or else I don’t consider myself done checking email.
This is a simple requirement of netiquette for me, since if I don’t answer (or otherwise act on) your email the first time I see it, I’m unlikely to see it again for weeks.
Fact is, I’m only organized in my electronic life. Which is why I pay all my bills that way…they’d never get paid before stuff was being shut off or reposessed if doing so depended on me opening snail mail and writing checks. (My unofficial motto: “If it’s written on paper by someone I couldn’t pick out of a small crowd, I won’t read it.” Which neatly excludes all the novelists whose work I’m interested in, but not much else.) But electronically, I can pay bills in a timely fashion without any problems.
December 28th, 2007 at 5:15 am
[...] 10. Get to zero. You don’t want your inbox to say you’re lazy. And you can’t leave any triage patients sitting stale in your inbox. [...]