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Discussion on: 16 Simple Tips to Boost Your Productivity x10

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ollytrolly profile image
Oliver Stevenson • Edited

A suggestion for those who can get inbox build-up/hoarding like me:

At a suitable interval such as the start of the month, just delete everything older than a certain date. Obviously this isn't okay for everyone to do, but for me at least, if something is older than a couple of weeks and no one has screamed, there's a good chance it no longer matters or isn't high enough priority to be worth the build up. If it is important and when it becomes a priority, I'm sure people will let you know with more than an email.

This may also be part of my secret plan to encourage people to contact me via a more conversational, transparent means (slack, teams) or an actual work ticket on the kanban. Email is often a terrible way of communicating I find - should be limited to one-to-many announcements or medium sized chunks of information that may be hard to represent in a chat client. Curious what others think.

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mcsee profile image
Maxi Contieri

Great tip

I’d change delete to archive

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ollytrolly profile image
Oliver Stevenson • Edited

Ah yes, I should've been clearer. The way I have it set in my email program (because my work uses outlook) is that only unread messages appear in my main inbox, and I have to explicitly mark them as read - so a little like archiving in modern web email clients. Except it eliminates this idea that the read state matters if you haven't dealt with it and it's still kicking around your inbox.

If space is a problem you can always delete big attachments before you start deleting emails.

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mcsee profile image
Maxi Contieri

We are in 2020. If space is a problem get another provider :)

I used to send mails in the early 90s and then space WAS indeed a problem on local servers with 10 MB HD. Not anymore!

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ollytrolly profile image
Oliver Stevenson

Haha, I'll make sure to forward your comment to our IT department ;).