Róisín Ingle on . . . Thinking outside the inbox

Once you begin the process of putting your house in order – at a conservative estimate, I reckon 50 bin bags full of stuff have gone to charity shops or landfill since I became a Konvert to Marie Kondo – the clutter mountain in other parts of your life begins to niggle away.

I am talking, of course, about email inbox overload.

BK (Before Kondo), I used to not care a continent that I had 17,000 emails in my gmail inbox. It didn’t cause me one moment’s anxiety. My whole life is in there, I used to reason. All the hilarious emails from friends. All the important milestones recorded. Delete my emails? I may as well delete my whole existence.

Yes, it is true that there are lots of badly punctuated emails from people claiming to be friends of mine who are stranded in Barcelona/Bahrain/ Timbuktu and need me to please (plis!) instantaneously wire them several thousands euro to aid their plight. Mostly, however, the emails are essential documents that I cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, delete.

Or are they? Of course not. I could delete most of them the same way I cleared my kitchen. There were no backward glances when I got rid of all the cups, plates, saucepans and gadgets that I didn’t use enough to justify keeping. (Spiraliser, it wasn’t you it was me.)

Surely I could just swoop into my email account and assess which emails "spark joy" and which ones are just companies trying to sell me things I don't need and princes from foreign lands telling me that I have won big, very important, lotery prise.

I can’t, though. I feel like I would be deleting my life. I don’t have time to go through them one by one. I could ask my assistant to do it, but (a) I don’t have an assistant, and (b) even if I did I’d worry he’d see too much and resign on the spot.

I don't have this problem with work emails. That's because every time you build up too many emails in an Irish Times account, a piercing alarm goes off in the building and gestapo-style figures march up to your desk and threaten you with extermination if you don't DELETE SOME EMAILS IMMEDIATELY.

This is a most effective, and perhaps gmail could consider such an option.

Thanks to the gestapo, the problem is more the amount of time I spend deleting useless work emails and emails with humongous picture attachments. Wasn’t email supposed to make communication effortless and more efficient? Sometimes it does. But much more of the time I am stemming the tide of emails from the widows of sub-Saharan dictators who have suitcases of blood diamonds that they want to give me.

Then there are all the weird emails from Chinese suppliers of random raw materials who want to “reach out” to me for reasons that defy logic. I keep getting emails from one person in Los Angeles who makes customised, tailored suits and he’s coming to Dublin for one day only and do I want to be fitted for a three-piece? No, I don’t. Get out of my inbox.

And don’t get me started on the LinkedIn messages. I wish there was a way of telling all the people who want to “connect” with me on LinkedIn that I will never be “connecting” with them ever. (Again, it’s not them, it’s me.)

Naturally, there are people inventing ways to keep this email problem at bay.

Inbox Zero, for example was developed by “productivity expert” Merlin Mann. Man, I need a guy like Mann. He says the zero in Inbox Zero is not a reference to the number of messages in your inbox, but “the amount of time an employee’s brain is in his inbox.”

Mann’s point is that time and attention are finite and productivity suffers when an inbox is confused with a “to do” list. Should you be the kind of person who shares this problem and intends to do something about it, then I must tell you that Mann’s system encourages you to “delete, delegate, respond, defer and do”. In that order. The rest of us will, of course, just ignore him.

After more research, I found another guy who boasts about going from 1,000 emails to none. But if my substandard maths skills can be trusted, my problem is 17 times worse than his. There’s nothing that dude can teach me.

Of course, it’s not just the email clutter that torments me. It’s my usual problem of keeping track of Important Events. The other day I sent an email apologising that I would not be able to attend a lunch the following day. Then I checked the date of the lunch, and deduced it had actually already happened last week. So I sent another email apologising for missing the lunch, only to be alerted to the fact that the event is actually happening next month.

I blame my assistant.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]