Lessons From the Inbox

A few weeks ago HHBL switched me from Pop! (whatever that means) to Exchange. The transition has gone well, most likely because I was already very familiar with Exchange and the whole if you delete it one place you delete it all the places thing.

But that is not what this is about. No my little email padawan, I want to speak about email management. 

I am, although I did not mean to be, an email hoarder.

I spent most of a Saturday morning working through all of the old emails that HHBL had saved for me from my old and now useless version of Outlook before the transition. Honestly, I don't think that I was really aware of just how many emails that I had laboriously stored in my email folder system and then had never gone back to look through. I might have found some emails that date back ELEVEN YEARS and didn't really have anything to do with my life now. They got "filed" and then slowly made their way to the bottom of the email pile, there to languish in email obscurity, presumably forever. They are now gone.

I might have found emails from Shoe Queen's high school detailing their new security measure....from 2008. I know that it was important....in 2008, but I think I can let go of them now. Nor do I need to keep her college freshman class schedule. Being the child/adult that she is, she would send me an Excel spreadhseet with her semester class load. You have to love a child that values Excel. And she had the good sense to marry someone who is even more Excel mad than we are.

Do I need to keep all the emails dealing with the progeny weddings? I am thinking not. There were A LOT of those. Weddings take a great deal of planning and emails flew back and forth from Illinois to Ohio to Uganda to India to Pakistan and back again. I have culled them, kept info that might be useful and then hit that big old Delete button to send them out of here and into wherever old and unloved emails go. Is it outer space? It has been fun to read through some of the emails that the progeny and I send to each other. We often have strange and humorous email exchanges. My gut reaction is to keep ALL OF THEM JUST IN CASE as they are sort of like a letter conversation. But I did not.

I found a treasure trove of emails that my father had sent me. I had thought that most of them had been deleted long ago but that is not the case. It has been so nice, especially as last week would have been his birthday week.

The thing about all of this is, it has taken time to go through all of these emails. Time right now is a precious commodity for me. There just isn't quite enough of it sometimes to get to all the things that I want to do. So let this be a lesson to you.

Clean out your emails and your inbox and your deleted folders. Or else one day they will consume you.