In deep in my inbox

I get a ton of e-mail. This isn’t necessarily because I’m popular (even though I am) or because I’m very important (although, again, that’s not untrue). No, I get a ton of e-mail because everyone gets a ton of e-mail, and instead of just dealing with their own problems, they feel the need to bring me down with them.\nLately, it’s really reached staggering proportions. I’ll leave for a 50-minute class and when I get home I have eight new e-mails. Now, I promise you, my life is not interesting enough to warrant that amount of new information.\nAnd it’s not like these e-mails are all junk. No, these aren’t all medical advancements and get-rich-quick schemes. These are announcements about opportunities I’m surely going to miss and things I won’t have time to do at work and party invites on Facebook that I’ll never make it to. Why am I too busy to do all of these things? Because of the insane number of hours I’ll have to spend deleting all this crap e-mail.\nOne week I’ll be on top of things and clear my mailbox completely out. A week later, however, if I’ve let things slide I’m back up to 200 e-mails in my inbox. It’s really shocking.\nI think the problem is I’m like an electronic pack rat. I feel guilty about quickly deleting e-mails that have any future implications, justifying to myself that I may need to know this later in the week. Soon I have so many e-mails that I don’t know what to do with them and I generally select all and just click delete in defeat.\nLuckily I don’t have to lose sleep over deleting all the junk people send me, but it seems like everyone else spends inordinate amounts of time doing the same thing. According to the Information Management Journal, Americans lose $21.6 billion in productivity each year in wasted time deleting e-mails.\nThings aren’t all bleak, though. Over the past few months, I have shown signs of improvement. For one, I finally wised up and have a Yahoo account that I use for all those Web sites that require an e-mail for use. \nAnother thing that helped was a conversation I had with my dad this summer about forwards. While my dad and I have the same sense of humor, I had to break the news to him that if he sent me one more forwarded joke I was going to have to tag his e-mail address as spam (it was nothing personal, of course).\nI’ve also taken some personal responsibility for this mess and have tried to think of other ways to cut down on the amount of e-mails I get daily, but none of them seem very practical. I mean, I could drop out of school, but that seems a bit overly dramatic, and I could deactivate Facebook, but then what would I do when I actually wanted to waste time? \nOther than that, there’s not much else I can do. I’m always afraid I’m going to miss some great opportunity if I don’t read all my e-mails, but like I said, I’m missing some great opportunities by reading all of my e-mails. It’s a real pickle.