Catch Up on my E-Mail

completed

in progress

I love receiving emails. Too bad I don’t love writing them as much. I always feel like an arse for not replying to my friends’ messages as soon as I’ve received them. When I finally do, it’s worth it. This is just one of those things that needs to be changed and it can be done so easily.

Just archived and emptied out my gmail inbox. I really dig gmail!

I’m going to try this one at a time. I’ve got a combination of big and small goals on my list, and I’m hoping that starting with the little ones will snowball into accomplishing some bigger ones.

So… My focus for now is to empty my inbox and then to catch up on replying to e-mails. It’s getting ridiculous!

A never ending job. I went to California a few months ago and didn’t have access to a computer there. My email piled into giant mole hills that I had to sift through to find my way out of.
Fortunately I don’t let the box fill up quite like that but once in a blue moon. Two or three days away from checking the boxes puts me far more behind than I care to be behind.

It’s time to consolidate and close accounts. I have 40 separate personal email accounts many of which I no longer use now that GMail gives me so much space. I need to start closing these unused accounts, and emptying out the history of each of these accounts and merging address books.

My goal is to close at least one email account a month, so that by the end of this year I will be down to at most 20 email accounts.

First targets: CollegeClub.Com, MailAndNews.Com, Mail.Com, and Hotmail.Com

Still working at this, little by little. I have a so-close-to-being-finished letter to my ex-boyfriend that I am going to finish and send TODAY. It’s a bit difficult to write to him since I mostly “know” him through his weblog now, and the persona he projects through his blog is quite different from the persona he projects through e-mail and in person. Keeping an actual e-mail dialogue going with him reminds me that he’s not the (self-proclaimed!) asshole that he is on his blog.

After that – yikes! I have a couple people I need to write to who haven’t heard from me in ages. These are “good friends”—at least, they should be, but thanks to me, they may not be anymore. I don’t know how to apologize enough to make it even vaguely acceptable that I haven’t written for so long.

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been writing e-mail for eleven years now, and I still haven’t gotten it right.

I wrote a long-overdue e-mail to a good friend of mine—my former roommate from Japan who’s now traveling across China. She’s got enough politeness in her to pop into libraries and Internet cafes and send periodic updates of her travels to all of her friends. I should have the decency to write her back once in a while, particularly since I have the luxuries of time and a computer keyboard without any unfamiliar characters. So I wrote her and finally told her how much I’d been enjoying her travelogue and updated her on these last, oh, seven months of my life. Yikes.

And, of course, it was painless, and only took thirty minutes. Self, remember this, and repeat it: your friends may be annoyed at you for not writing often enough, but they’ll be happy to hear from you when you do write. Just remember that every day you spend not keeping in touch with people is another day that those people have an excuse to be annoyed with you.

Though this didn’t do anything toward my “spend less time fooling around on the Net and more time actually working” goal, I spent about 10 minutes at work today sifting through my Yahoo inbox and weeding out messages that didn’t need responses: old LJ comment e-mails, mass e-mails from various charitable oragnizations, things I’d responded to three years ago but never deleted or sorted into a folder, et cetera. Sure, I didn’t actually answer any e-mail, but I felt a lot more motivated to do so, now that my in-box is down from 135 to 80-something. And a lot of those are old, too. I need to do some more sifting and just figure out if I’m actually going to respond to a letter sent to me in October 2003. Yeah.

Goal for this week: write 3 e-mails to friends who probably think I’ve died.