1 post tagged “guardian”

I was weeding out my rusty old rolodex this morning (I actually am unhappy with the format it comes in and wishing for a more intelligent rolodex design on top of that, have suggestions come my way, thanks!), and realized that it is a history all in itself. I found contacts that have long switched jobs and positions, and I know it since these changes are logged online, at that business networking site we're connected through. I found incredibly old email account login data, all encrypted and safe, but I've long stopped using these accounts - because I couldn't find back the login data. And so on and so forth. Some of these entries go back ten years or longer. Crazy!

And just now I opened Google reader to fetch some news headlines, and I read an article by Cory Doctorow for the Guardian: How to stop you inbox from exploding.

The article isn't so much about a rolodex, but about clever archiving without losing control over the amounts of data piling up over time. And all of this done online. My favourite part is this:

I live and die in my email (...). It's my alpha and my omega, my version control system (if I want to find an old version of a document, I just find the copy I emailed to someone earlier), my address book, my journal and my confessor. I have over a million archived pieces of email, going back to 1991.

Sounds familiar.

Before the internet, I used to file letters, private and business, for later access or for nostalgia. I have quite a perfect offline filing system, if I may say so, that gets regularly pruned. But even after being online for almost 14 years, my Email filing could still use some good tweeks. Corporate world has helped to refine my skill of  setting priorities in reading incoming email; how to file contacts and data.  But unfortunately also to delete quite aggressively. I have lost quite a deal of private correspondence with friends, all because of silly routine.

Nevertheless, Doctorow resumes in four good points how to manage one's inbox, how to keep it clean from unwanted clutter and how to rationally decide what really is worthy to ever make it through and what isn't. It's nothing new or particularly innovative, but it's a good reminder which we should set ourselves every now and then. Just for the sake of sanity in our email inboxes.