Dear Diary,
I got an interesting email titled:
Hoarders vs. Deleters: What your inbox says about you.
By JEFFREY ZASLOW Wall Street Journal 2006-08-10
(AP) - You are your inbox.
Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages.
The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you.
"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?"
*
Librarian-in-Excellence says, "Not I"
:)
*On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.
*
Librarian-in-Excellence says, "Hmmm..could be?"
:(
*:(
Email addiction, of course, is now a cultural given. But a less-noticed byproduct of that is the impulse of the inbox. Some of us are obsessed with moving every email to an appropriate folder while killing junk "spam" on arrival and making sure Mom knows that we got her email and still love her. Meanwhile, others among us are e-procrastinators, modern-day Scarlett O'Haras who figure we'll deal with old email tomorrow. We're discovering that the disorder in our inboxes mirrors the disorder in our homes, marriages and checkbooks.
Those who are too nice in other areas of their lives may be more likely to struggle with unwieldy inboxes, says Merlin Mann, creator of 43folders.com, a Web site about personal productivity. Polite people (or those who want to be liked) feel obliged to participate in ping-pong correspondences with chatty friends. They haven't the heart to give anyone the no-response brush-off. But Mr. Mann says such ruthlessness is necessary.
*
Librarian-in-Excellence says, "Suckers!"
Ha!
*In Greensboro, N.C., Internet consultant Wally Bock keeps his inbox down to a manageable few dozen messages. He credits his sense of order to "having disciplined parents who made that a value." Still, he recognizes the downside. Many "Inbox Zero" zealots interrupt their work every time they hear a ping announcing incoming email. "Multitasking is a misnomer," says Mr. Bock. "What you're really doing is switching rapidly between tasks. And every time you switch, you have to start up again. Over the course of a day, you lose a chunk of efficiency."
University of Toronto instructor Christina Cavanagh studied hundreds of office workers for her book "Managing Your Email: Thinking Outside the Inbox." One of her subjects, a finance executive, had 10,000 emails in his inbox. She advised him to simply delete the oldest 9,000. Busy people, drowning in email, may have no choice but to kill old messages and suffer the consequences. (Mr. Mann calls this "euthanasia.")
Because "inboxes are metaphors for our lives," Dr. Greenfield says, there's no cure-all solution to inbox management. We're all too different. But he believes an awareness of our inbox behavior can help us better understand other areas of our lives.
"If you have 1,000 emails in your inbox, it may mean you don't want to miss an opportunity, but there are things you can't pull the trigger on," Dr. Greenfield says.
"If you have only 10 emails in your inbox, you may be pulling the trigger too fast and missing the richness of life."
*
Librarian-in-Excellence says, "Says You!"
***Cartoon image from http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/i/inboxes.asp
