Having pretty much stayed offline the whole of the end of year holiday break imagine my horror at seeing the dreaded email inbox. 250 plus messages. Where does it all come from during a holiday period? I have a number of automated subscription style notification services. That accounts for about 80%. Another 10% comes from people dropping me a note on the off chance I might be interested in what they say. That’s borderline spam and almost always gets deleted without opening. The final 10% represents stuff from sources and around topics in which I am interested.
Ideally I’d like to concentrate attention on that final 10% but the other 90% has to be processed before I can get to any of it. That’s where filtered lists come in. Despite being used to dealing with email on a daily basis the year’s opening tsunami show I’ve not created enough lists. There was way too much ‘stuff’ in the general email inbox. More important, the exercise has concentrated my thinking to deleting my name from a clutch of lists. I don’t get enough value to compensate for the effort needed to work through all the ‘stuff’ I receive.
Lesson 1 for 2010. And like all such lessons, painful.
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