My Inbox is a Disaster

I don't want to admit it, but my email has gotten out of hand.  For years now I have been a fairly aggressive Inbox Zero practitioner - although I kind of break one rule.  Each day I would process my inbox to zero: acting, filing, or deferring whatever was there two or three times each day so that there was nothing in my inbox.  I have historically been a little dysfunctional about it, with the notification icon on my phone being a small source of irritation.

Of course doing things this way is all very five years ago.  Inbox Zero is a folders mentality and I have a directory tree with many, many branches.  The Google Inbox is supposed to break that mold and have you keep everything right where you find it but assign things tags and find them by searching rather than by looking in the correct folder.  For a little while I have been doing a hybrid.  I have my folders and for things that are fairly recent I stay in Outlook and check the correct place.  For things that are older I bring up the Gmail web interface and search.

I don't know if I was trying to bring myself around to the Google Inbox idea or if it was something else but this fall I really stopped the processing behavior.  One of my folders, the rule breaking one "ToDo" just declared war and conquered my Inbox and so instead of being nice and empty it was always choked with slowly rotting messages.

Partially I think this coincided with making an effort to accept assignments electronically.  I've been taking work as pdf files attached to emails.  A combination of that and the sabbatical my ToDo folder is on really produced a boom.  Without the ToDo weigh-station and not wanting to file emails with pending assignment attachments there was nothing to do but let things pile up in the Inbox.  Recently I have been putting new document folders on my desktop, moving the attachments to those and then filing the emails, but the students defeat that when instead of attaching a pdf they share a Google Doc.  Then my new solution is no solution.

I miss my ToDo folder and my FollowUp folder.  But at the end of last summer I declared folder bankruptcy and dumped everything that was remaining in there into my Inbox with the hope of chipping away at it until I could get through it all.  Some messages had languished in the ToDo folder so long that it seemed downright irresponsible.

So I started the year with a backlog - never a good thing.  Then the assignment emails started piling up.  And then we had a pandemic and everything went online.

The days between the announcement we were going online and the first day we were online were probably the heaviest email days in memory.  We were getting instructions and surveys from three different university administration levels and many of those generated helpful contributions from other colleagues in response to the originals and it all just piled up.  There's stuff in there I just don't want to process because I really do think I should read it.  But it has been nearly a month now and I haven't.

There are only three weeks of classes left in the semester.  I think this year's end of semester tying of loose ends is going to have to include an Inbox cleanout.  Even if it means doing a cntrl-A & delete.