Infinite Inbox

ijmaki via Pixabay

Last Thursday, I posted something in class for my students' reference and, at the same time, unwittingly shared another piece of information that didn't make me look so good.

"Professor Hess!" one of my young ladies cried. "Do you really have 4,175 unread emails?"

I reassured her that most of them were newsletters that I'd go in and delete once the semester was over.

She was no less horrified.

My email inbox is my organizational Achilles' heel. Like the piles of to-be-read books that are on bookshelves throughout my house, they belie both a sense of optimism and a lack of time. I keep thinking I'm going to have time to dig in and see what goodies lie beneath the snappy subject lines and tantalizing titles.

Only I never do.

So, now that the semester is (almost) over, it's (almost) time to dig in. The first step is to set parameters (what to get rid of and what to keep), but that also raises some questions. If "newsletter" implies "news," for example, how old does an email have to be to no longer qualify as "news"? If I keep tax records for seven years, how long do I keep emails from former students? And, perhaps most important, how do I create and access the archives on my school account?

These questions are just the tip of the iceberg and I'm sure that once I dig in, new ones will emerge as well. While I'd love to set lofty goals like inbox zero, I'm too realistic -- and too I need to see it -- to even dream of such a possibility.

So for now, I'll just settle for reducing the number to something less embarrassing.

And maybe unsubscribing from a few of those newsletters.