Email is terrible.
First, a note of thanks. A number of our dear readers rallied upon seeing the badge notification on my cellular telephone alerting me to the almost 80,000 unread email messages. Your concern was touching, and I appreciate the deeply personal decision to share your obsessive-compulsive reaction to my crowded inbox. There really is hope for this old world.
However, the responses revealed some very troubling things, far more disturbing than tens of thousands of unread email messages:
@christhorman @AlfieBCC @edsbs 79k. Pikers. http://ift.tt/1CVIoKU
— ryan van bibber (@justRVB) February 5, 2015
What is your obsession with the number zero? I learned that winnowing down the old inbox until there are no unread messages is important to some folks. It sounds like classic compulsive behavior to me. At the very least, some uptight concrete sequential squares trying to take the chill out of my approach to the Internet's lamest and sort of outdated mode of communication. (Follow up question: How much time do you spend messing with email in the first place? Maybe YOUR priorities are out of whack and your costing yourself valuable time to tweet about hot sauces and IPAs or read excellent sports #content at your favorite sports website, SBNation.com).
But what about badges, filters, notifications and stuff? What about them indeed. I'm glad that you've found some nifty lifehacks to make your phone work for you. I'm sure that you're using them constructively, but let's be honest, finagling your alerts and badges isn't really improving your life all that much. Do you really think that makes you more productive? Are you spending all those extra minutes hanging out in the park with your dog or quitting smoking or some other activity that's going to add seconds to the end of your life? No, you're not. Maybe a few of your really are, but you're probably just using those notifications to create a new subset of notifications, not to mention keeping your inbox at zero.
You never know when you're going to need one of those messages. Most of my unread email messages fall into the broad category of "junk." But not's the most accurate way to describe them.
Consider the catalog, miniature glossy magazines that used to arrive randomly in your mailbox with pictures of things available for you to purchase. They were great for a bathroom reader. You flip through, finish your business and take it the recycling bin a day later, thinking about what a great deal that was for a cool new thing to hold the water bottle on your bicycle, maybe someday you're going to buy one those ... not today though. Today's not the day to buy a thing to hold your water bottle. But when spring rolls around and you ride your bike more, well, you may want to reconsider. All those messages accruing under the "promotions" tab are kind of the same thing, reminders.
A recent sampling:
- Someday, I'm totally going to take a vacation, and the barrage of crap from the various travel sites is going to be helpful, probably.
- A Taiwanese animation video, you want me to delete that?
- The Pokemon thing is from a couple months back when my son got into Pokemon. It's confusing as hell to play, and I thought we might figure it out online. Nope. But someday we might, and then we'll already be setup at the official Pokemon site, just one quick inbox search away (hopefully he finds other kids who can teach him how to play or develops an interest in something less nerdy).
- I don't always have time to read email newsletters, but that doesn't mean I want to unsubscribe completely.
- Commenters from the various SB Nation NFL sites complaining about why they were banned ... come on, that's just hilarious reading.
And so on ...
It's like hoarding. But it's really not. These unread messages don't take up a single inch of space in my house. There aren't mystery cats living underneath them. It's chiefly a problem for Google's servers, and since I still have about 70 percent of my free space left, it's not a problem at all.
I am not ignoring* your email. As terrible and pointless as it may be, there's still a necessary function for email. Roughly 10 percent of all the messages I get are work-related. Some require a response, and get one within an appropriate window of time. Very rarely do messages require an immediate reply. And if they do, there's probably a better way of getting my attention.
*I may be ignoring your email. It's probably just not really that important.
Email is awful. Let's not overlook the real bad guy here: email, a useless, terrible way to communicate.
If you're still bothered by a large volume of unread messages, please feel free to chastise me in the comments or send me an email that I'll enjoy reading next week if I feel like it.
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