Normally in my life, I’m pretty decent at being organized. I have a productivity system that works, my mind (which gets older by the minute) is for the most part not as forgetful as a goldfish, and I think that with the various things I do I have it fairly under control.
That being said, there’s always one part of someone’s life, no matter how obsessed with sorting they are, where there is a bit of healthy clutter. For me, it’s email. For a geek-obsessive like me, having email is kind of like breathing, and to have it as disorganized and disjointed as I leave it is always a challenge to deal with.
I’d have to say that I have three levels of email clutter at any time:
- Mail-con 1 – Only 6 or 7 whole pages of mail grace my presence. Advertisements are sort of discarded, personal mails to be replied to are waiting, and it’s relatively easy to find things.
- Mail-con 2 – 12 to 15 pages of mail are stuffed into my electronic box. Advertisement mails are unread but left in the mailbox for fear of catching the virtual equivalent of cooties. I recall personal mails 3 weeks old that might be helpful to answer but which get buried in a haze of Left 4 Dead play sessions and huge amounts of procrastination
- Mail-con 3 – “You are using 6985MB of 7000MB allowed”, also known as “ARE YOU BAT SHIT INSANE?!!!!!”
I don’t know what it is exactly, that keeps this part of my geekery so messed up. I know a lot of people and get a ton of notices and updates and mails about them all the time, so that might be part of the reason. Another is the sheer intimidation factor of going through and dealing with mail in general. E-mail, to me, is like walking into a lion’s cage with a whip and a chair – it’s a savage beast with a life of its own and you end up getting your head bitten off if you aren’t careful.
It’s funny, because even though geeks are totally smart and intelligent most of the time, there’s always an irrational portion of them that makes them behave in an odd way. For me, it’s the dread of opening email and it somehow coming to my house and into my bed at night to eat me because I answered and deleted it. Having 1256 emails that could potentially do that to you is a recipe for procrastination and inbox stuffing the likes of which you haven’t seen since a Chicago election.
As always, I like to look on the bright side of this whole situation. I do, after all, seem to have a lot of people who like to mail me. Sure, they want to sell me breast implants with a free laptop if I just give up my bank account information to some random rich person, but hey, mail is mail. Occasionally there’s the fun little gem of replying “I’m doing fine” to a “how are you”, but for the most part, I like to see the mail pile up as a testament to how much I must whore my own address, or my own presence, online.
If you’ve mailed me, don’t worry – I’ll get to you….eventually.