Episode 44, Introduction: "A Workdesk Stacked With Over 130,000 Unread Emails"

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #44: "A Group of Over 100,000 Emails Walk Into a Bar…" It took some effort, but I have finally achieved over 35,000 Unread Work Emails. (and 100,000 Personal Ones) Hi, everyone, welcome back to the show. Bit of a fun one this week. Depending on your personality type, the phrase "I have over 130,000 unread emails" will either place you in one of three or four personality categories: Discomfort over the idea of this (That makes me anxious), Competition (I have more than that!), Disconcern (So What?) or Self-Reflective/Assessing (I only have 20, I'm fine). But it's unlikely any of you will envy a person with such a stockpile. I can't sell this batch of unread emails as a currency, just the number itself, for example. (Though if this were Google, they would be selling the information gathered, but that's another topic) – Really, the acquisition of such a bounty of unread messages is a descriptor of a kind of personality, nothing more or less. But I decided about twelve years ago, when my daily management of emails had run over to 500 Unread Messages, to just let the faucet continue unabated. If I missed a message, someone would surely message again, and not going through a daily drill of negotiating trashed messages or folder arrangement provided literal hours of rescued time to my work week. So, at 500 unread emails and 3,000 unread work emails (ha), I thought: "Let's see how far we can take this". After a year of not organizing messages into separate folders, I found I'd developed a very comprehensive habit. I hadn't missed a single important message from or to anyone. There was only one folder: My INBOX, and it was easy to look at 200-300 messages a day visually to determine if I needed to open a message, or if the subject itself was suitable to indicate its contents. I started to receive compliments from co-workers for my dependable communication style, as well. Oddly, the less I cared about structuring and organizing, the more I was perceived as provably structured and organized.