Analysis of 3 Months of Unread Email

I am reading unread email. I just hit the 3 months backward mark. There is still plenty of unhandled email from the last 3 months, but nothing that gmail counts as unread.

In that basket were a few emails that I clearly hadn’t read and made me flake. A tiny but important group.

As for the rest…

• The largest group was event notifications. Don’t know how many I really hadn’t read and how many I read then marked unread. Of these zero were useful. In all cases, the event had passed, the event was already on my calendar, or both.
• The second largest group was chapters of a sequential book or lessons. All of these were still worth reading and would have been better to read in order. I need a better way to receive these. Separate account. Auto filing. Something.
• The third group was notifications from LinkedIn. None of these were useful. I don’t know if there is a way to limit LinkedIn to just send me the much smaller class of notifications that are useful. If not, I should create a filtering rule.
• The fourth largest was the few projects that send me daily digests that I really want to read; but can’t keep up with. I should probably give up and either read them as I get them or file them away. Even if they are worth reading as they come out, they aren’t worth reading late.
• The fifth largest group was an email I read, marked as unread with intent to take care of it that day, and somehow didn’t. This was a very small set, only one of which was very important. Probably should be boomeranging these instead.

That’s it.

Photo by Alex on Unsplash

Analysis of 3 Months of Unread Email was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.