30 Days of Email Domination: On to Three

By Sol in Blog

Has skipping email for 2 weeks proven to be too much to handle?

Nope.

I can’t say I had any difficulty with the wait at all. In fact, I seriously considered just letting it ride and steer clear of email for another whole week. The only reason I processed my messages today was because I needed to check for bills and bank statements.

Ruthless

Being ruthless about auto-blocking unwanted messages held additional significance today when I set up a filter to block messages from a family member who sends links to articles to everyone in the family. We all get emails from someone like this, but I still felt bad about it. However, since I’m not going to read those articles, these messages were just noise and had to go.

At first I thought, “it’s not so bad, I can just delete these messages as they come.” This confirmed once and for all that auto-blocking was my only option– never manually do anything that can be automated.

Two Better than One?

I was quite curious how long it would take to process 2 weeks worth of messages today. Would the increased message volume lead to faster processing? Would I end up with even more messages to filter? In any case, keeping message processing under 10 minutes did not seem likely, but I remained my goal nonetheless.

Thankfully, total message processing required less than 10 minutes with a bit of time to spare. Additionally, today’s average message processing rate is the highest since January, so that’s nice. All in all, I’d say that the 2 week experiment was a success.

On to three.

Today’s Stats

  • Checked email: 1 time
  • Time: 14:10
  • Total messages: 163
    • Inbox: 23
    • Bulk: 39
    • Important: 0
  • Management: 9
    • Incorrect Smart Label: 1
    • Unsubscribe: 4
    • Update filtering: 2
    • Spam: 2
  • Time per Message
    • Inbox: 03:45 (9.9 messages/minute)
    • Bulk: 02:01 (19.3 messages/minute)
    • Management (filters, etc.): 03:48
    • Total: 09:34
    • Average: 17.0 messages/minute