I keep all of my email. This makes for fun trips down memory lane, like reading some flirtatious messages back and forth between myself and my good friend Andrew’s hot little sister when we were in high school.
Sorry man, you can flirt with my sisters all you want.
I recently found the archive button in gmail, which takes everything out of your inbox and shoves it into the “All Mail” folder for future use. It does basically the same thing, but now my inbox only has one message that I have to respond to whenever I figure out what an international dating company can do for me as a favour.[1] I think an intro to the playboy mansion is a little much, but I don’t really need anything else. Maybe I’ll use it as a favour for a friend.
Anyone want anything?
Having an empty inbox is surprisingly calming. It’s the same feeling as when I got rid of my apartment and most of my stuff in order to fit my life into little bags to take with me to China. All of a sudden I don’t have anything to worry about. I don’t have a choice of things to wear; I just put on a shirt and jeans that I bought after meeting a professional fashion coach in London. I don’t have to worry about rent, locking my door or having my shit stolen; I have no shit. I don’t have to think about upgrading my kitchen knife because of how useless it is, cleaning a really disgusting couch that I no longer have, or gradually throwing away junk that just wasn’t worth having to begin with.
But I still have this one email hanging out in my inbox and keeping me from complete nirvana.
So I went a step further and checked out my buddy’s website for an idea that he’d talked about in Sweden. He wrote a simple guide to managing your email that fixes my little problem. Now I have a Reply label and a Waiting label, and an empty inbox. I generally keep some emails that have important information in them that I don’t feel like copying over to their appropriate documents, so I also have an Important Archive label.
Gmail is spectacular. If you’re using MSN, Outlook or anything of the sort, you should really check out Google’s offerings. If you’re using Yahoo Mail, the internets might not be for you. If you switch, you don’t even have to tell your friends about your new email address, you can just forward email to your brand new Gmail account and set up its handy Send mail as feature, all the while basking in the same wonderful feeling as me.
Inbox zero, baby.
[1] I got tens of thousands of dollars worth of free training out of them just for being a guinea pig on a documentary, but apparently I can’t do them a favour without getting one back… So I’m going to sneakily give these awesome dating coaches links and good anchor text :) Hey Nick!
I’m not going to write exclusively about China forever, but you can let me know what you’d like to read more of by liking the posts that you, well, like.