By Odoh Diego Okenyodo
We have thousands of unread mails in our accounts as if we can monetise them. Your email address is not a bank account, so why do you keep storing mails you won’t read and won’t need? There are many reasons: a large number of them bordering on indecision, laziness and indiscipline.
You get many emails because you have many interests or responsibilities. You should have them. But are you alive to those responsibilities and interests? Are the interests just fleeting hobbies or things you are committed to taking forward? Like, you want to learn about different types of dogs and their unique features, then you go subscribe to newsletters, create Google Alerts, join discussion forums, and fall for some website that’s willing to dump its confusion on you in the name of an e-newsletter. But you have got office mails to deal with. You are a member of a subcommittee organising the annual retreat or midyear conference, or whatever way your organisation chooses to bore its staff. Itomall this, emails pour in like Lagos rain.
One way to deal with constant streams of emails is to set aside two or three bouts of 30 minutes for you to make quick decisions about what to acknowledge, keep, sort, or delete. In terms of action, the ones you will use the most are Acknowledge and Delete, trust me. If you choose to keep mails, you are better off creating some categories and sorting them into those categories. If you get a lot of emails from family and friends asking for support (which is the major pastime or occupation these days), you can create a category for those types of mails, something like Beggy-Beggy. (Don’t use that; I’m joking! But you get the drift.)
You can also create filters for certain types of emails. Filters are of various types: you can say mails from certain people should head straight to Trash, just bypass the Inbox, or direct them to specific folders you have created to handle such emails. (I repeat, don’t use names like Beggy-Beggy; that’s not polite.) You can also have emails forwarded to specific persons that need to deal with them while you only save them in a folder for record purposes. If, for instance, you run a business and you want customer complaints to always come to your attention, despite having a customer care executive that deals with it, such forwarders can help to give an idea of how many complaints are pouring in and for you to follow up on actions taken according to the organisation’s target. To achieve this, you create the filter using specific words like “Complaint” and apply the commands. They are easy tasks to accomplish in whatever email app or service you use.
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Of course, when mails have been sorted, you can read each one manually, or for newsletter or podcast subscriptions, have them automatically marked as ‘Read’ because you now have a warehouse for them if you need to (re)visit them. You can also mark everything as ‘Read’ in one or two clicks of the mouse or finger taps on your phone screen.
Why am I interested in you cleaning up the mailbox? Does it affect me? Yes. It does. Many of you are walking about like 50kg bags of stress and worried about what actions you need to take, (or planning how to beat up your supervisors) or just incompetent at handling your mailboxes. Yes, I dare to use the word. This is why you keep getting lost in deep thoughts while driving and end up crashing your car into those of fellow confused, reckless email owners; then you go about yelling, “Do you know who I am?” I know who you all are: email environmental polluters. You need to change your ways.
But in all seriousness, I have four things I think cleaning your mailbox will do for you. One, it will give you sanity or a semblance of it, because it does not give you money in these hard times. You won’t be needing to figure out how to move through the jungle of bad grammar that emails often are. And, related to that is, it makes you feel organised as a person. When you log in and see zero unread emails, all organised into folders, you feel like you have walked into a 5-star hotel room with pillows and duvets well placed. Never mind that those bedsheets in 5-stars hotels are rarely washed after a guest leaves, but they make you feel good. That’s all that matters.
The third benefit of cleaning up your mailbox is that it creates a good image of your kind of person. You know how, when you are making presentations, your PowerPoint lets the audience take a peek at your always-cluttered computer desktop, and you murmur apologies? Ehen! Same for emails. Sometimes, you have to open up a file from emails, and people can see everything, some of which can be cringe-worthy. Finally, sanitising your box makes you less likely to mix up your archives of emails, the ones you now desire to keep. You would have adequately sorted them, and you can go into the folder and deal with them appropriately.
I hope with these few points of mine, I have been able to confuse you and not convince–sorry, I meant, convince you and not confuse you–that if you sanitise your mailbox, we can meet our climate change goals, because there will be less email-induced stress in our society. Thank you, my able Moderator and the partial timekeeper.
