30 Days of Email Domination: Workout

By Sol in Blog

The Warm Up

I don’t really want to check my email. Four weeks have passed and the idea of processing my messages feels really foreign.

It feels strange loading up Gmail without doing a specific search to find a particular message.

I just checked and it’s actually been 5 weeks since I last saw the inside of my inbox. Oops.

I suppose I should check my messages today or soon 6 weeks will have passed without email (is that such a bad thing?).

Let’s do this.

Post Workout

I just finished processing nearly 400 messages and I’m exhausted. I didn’t like it at all.

Checking my email didn’t feel smooth or easy. Instead, it felt like something very unnatural.

Perhaps 4 weeks is too long to let email go unchecked, or perhaps 4 weeks is just long enough to stop caring about email. I’m all for that.

I can just barely hear a little voice in my ear telling me that I shouldn’t be giving email the time of day even if just once a month. It’s saying that I should let the email pile up and do whatever it wants to my inbox as long as I don’t have to touch it ever again. I can just cherry pick the messages I want from now on.

Sounds good to me.

At the same time, a more reasonable, even-tempered, and organized voice is screaming, pleading, and waving its hands frantically in the air to stop me from even entertaining such a notion.

“Once you go down that road,” it says, “you can never come back.”

You decide you want to get your inbox in order one day down the road? You’ll be in for a world of pain trying to clear the weeds and make the inbox fit for use once again.

“Far better to go back to processing messages every 3 weeks, ” the voice quite reasonably assures me. After all, that yielded the fastest message processing time in months, and it was easy.

If it’s easy, it’s not hard right?

Okay, tiny reasonable voice, you win. I’ll go back to checking my messages once every 3 weeks…for now.

But I still like that dropping-email-forever idea, so you’ll have to be very convincing in 3 weeks.

Today’s Stats

  • Checked email: 1 time
  • Time: 14:59:23
  • Total messages: 379
    • Inbox: 61
    • Bulk: 65
    • Important: 0
    • Action: 53
    • To Read: 53
  • Management: 36
    • Incorrect Smart Label: 0
    • Unsubscribe: 33
    • Update filtering: 2
    • Spam: 1
  • Time per Message
    • Inbox: 06:42 (9.1 messages/minute)
    • Bulk: 07:08 (9.1 messages/minute)
    • Management (filters, etc.): 11:15 (3.2 messages/minute)
    • Total: 25:05
    • Average: 15.1 messages/minute