email

There are many productivity “experts” that insist you should work hard to empty your email inbox - process it to zero. Others have even taken to giving one who does this the title of “Email Ninja”, which sounds cool but if you’re working towards adopting Eventualism…it shouldn’t. What is lost when you do that is the reason email exists in the first place: to give us the satisfaction that we are as popular as we wanted to be when we were in high school.

That’s right. I said it. Remember back to your high school days – you likely fell into one of two categories, class structure or “cliques”: Geek or Not Geek. There was no in-between. Don’t even try to argue that point. I was there.

So, let’s say for argument’s sake you fell into the Geek model. I’ll try to relate. You would have spent very little time in the circle of communication. More often you’d find yourself in isolation, either in a study hall or cramped locker. There was some emptiness there. It was unavoidable. [Read more...]

During my countless hours surfing the web this week, I’ve come across a few things that have caught my eye. Two things in particular, grabbed my eye and shook the hell out of it. Both eyes, actually.

First off, the website known as Lifehacker (which makes me think about my life being hacked – possibly to death) has been presenting a Spring Cleaning Series. Now, while I prefer to do my spring-cleaning in October, the average productivityist takes this time of year to declutter and delete. But one article in this series gave me eventual pause – and then cause for concern. It was about “declaring email bankruptcy.” I read it through, expecting it to be about one thing, but then discovered it was about something else altogether. This is why I usually don’t read. It generally leads to eventual disappointment.

The term bankruptcy, as defined by me, is that you have so much debt that you need to divest yourself from it so you can move on. I think it also brings on seven years of bad luck. But this article seems to think that having too much email means you should declare bankruptcy. Eventualism shows that emails are an asset. Name me one person that declares bankruptcy because they have too many assets. No matter how long I give you….you’ll neventually come up with a single person. It is by pure definition then, that email bankruptcy really is having no email at all – and you need to earn more email to get out of it. So, if you didn’t click on the link in this paragraph, you really should. It’ll show you how to get out of the email bankruptcy I’m talking about and into the email bankruptcy that Lifehacker is talking about.

I’ll give them credit in that the suggestion is to archive those emails, so you can refer back to them later if you feel the burning desire. But if you’re “email-rich” then you should revel in it, not be averse to it. Same goes with RSS feeds. I’ve got over 2000 starred RSS feeds dating back to early 2009 and I’m still referring to them now and again. Invest in more email – don’t divest what email you have. The former is how you become a more prolific Eventualist. The latter is how you do not do the former.

The second thing that caught me was that OK Go video with the machine-thing. Glad I eventually found it.

Thanks, starred RSS feeds!

How To Be An Email Pirate

What Is Email Bankruptcy, Really?