Coffee heat rising

Decluttering the In-box

Okay, now that the desk is shoveled off, the question is how to shovel out the incoming clutter in the e-mail in-box. Am I the only employee or quasi-employee of an institution that engages in an ongoing campaign to strafe the entire planet with pointless, irrelevant messages? You can’t block them, because some of them are very relevant, indeed. But those relevant messages come along once every three months. In between times, you’re hitting the “delete” button thousands of times.

Truly. Over a hundred messages come in every single day.

The menu for the campus cafeteria at Phoenix College, where I do not now teach and have not taught for a good ten years.

A chatty P.R. newsletter emanating from the Phoenix College president’s office.

The weekly crime report from the Phoenix College campus cops.

The program guide for the district’s low-wattage local cable station.

Endless, endless, endless pitches for the district’s United Way campaign.

Announcements for various public service courses and minicourses at campuses around the Valley (a “caregiver class” at Scottsdale; “Safe Space” training at Phoenix; Life-long Learning: “Preparing for Finals”).

Reminders to hourly workers to submit their time & labor reports.

A “Happy Thanksgiving” message from the district’s employee store (and BTW, they’re offering “special discounts for our valued MCCCD employees!”)

A bottomless pit of employee training sessions (two sessions to help with the FSA online enrollment process, whatever that is).

Announcements for stage, open-air, and athletic performances at every campus across the Valley.

And scores of e-mails from individuals who just want to share with every employee in the vast district: someone sent a photo of Saturn; a coach crowed that the Paradise Valley girl’s soccer team won a championship and a dozen people sent kudos to every single soul on the college’s mailing list. Just this minute, one of my colleagues sent photos of a trip to Greece to everyone at his college.

Some of this stuff is apparently going out to more than one mailing list, and lucky  me, I somehow got on two of them. About half of it arrives in duplicate.

Sifting through all this trash is amazingly time-consuming. You can’t just point and click “delete.” Your cursor has to come to rest on every. single. message, and of course when it does it opens the damn thing. When you’re busy and you have, say, 25 more papers to grade (as I do today), even a couple seconds per message is a distraction and a minor aggravation. I have enough minor aggravations in my day, thank you.

An occasional message is one that needs attention, but not now. If I let it sit on the server until I get time to deal with it, then it quickly sinks beneath the waves of the oncoming tsunami of junkmail.

MacMail allows you to sort incoming messages into various subdirectories, including the trash. If you send something to the “trash” directory on Apple’s servers, it gets deleted automatically every few days, which is nice. However, some of it, I don’t want to have deleted. The guy who sends out his hobby photos, for example, occasionally emits an important message that I don’t want to lose. And among all the chaff that comes from the district are job announcements. Yes. Announcements for real, paying jobs. I still do apply for full-time positions, even though it’s a forlorn hope.

The aggravation rises to the “major” level, though, when the confusion spawned by the constant static leads you to overlook messages that you do want to receive: student papers, e-mails from colleagues that matter (like the occasional valuable messages from the photo buff), incoming from clients, reminders from your calendar.

My answer to this conundrum has been to set up a passel of subsidiary in-boxes, direct certain classes of messages to those, and then check them every few days. If nothing that matters appears, I can then Command-A to select all and send them into the ether.

Most of these sub-mailboxes hold messages I need to hang onto for various reasons. E-mail to and from problem students, for example, needs to be kept until there’s no risk of any later repercussions. Some messages from clients ought not to go away for awhile. Some of the blog carnivals are now set up to forward submissions to the host’s personal in-box, an awful nuisance (and one reason,in addition to the astonishing workload, that I’ve quit hosting so often).

Two or three weeks ago I started marking e-mail addresses that send me totally irrelevant messages so that everything that comes from them goes straight to the trash on Apple’s server. This derails a lot…but it’s quite a chore, since an enormous number of offices and individual employees in the District send out nothing but trash. I’ve now marked fifty-six senders’ e-mail addresses this way! And more keep sifting in.

That doesn’t count the general announcements that are likely to contain job ads, which go into the “CC Announcements” box.

These automatic side-tracking boxes add to the drag-and-drop categories, such as “Act on These ASAP,” where I can stash things that I need or may need until I can get to them.

The goal is to leave the in-box only for those incoming messages that matter and can be dealt with right now and then deleted. This plan is working to get some of the trash out from under my nose. But it’s not perfect:

And I need to get up, feed the dog, feed myself, and start reading papers. 🙄