Today’s post is about email, but really it’s about persistence. A week and a half ago, I had 221,000 unread emails. Yes, that’s right - 221,000. I’m not adding an extra zero. Fifteen or so years ago, back before Yahoo was even a glimmer in any founder’s eye, I created an “e-mail” address on the “World Wide Web”. I chose a service almost completely at random because I liked the name, Rocket Mail. At the time, I was fascinated by the Princess Bride, and specifically the character of Fezzik (who am I kidding - I still am). Et voila, fezzik@rocketmail.com was born. I didn’t consider it terribly important. I highly doubted I would use it for anything important. Ever since then, I’ve thrown it around willy-nilly. I never hesitated to give it to anyone. It was the village bicycle - everyone had a ride. But it also became an incredibly important gateway to friends and even family. Some are amazed that I could have accumulated 221k unread emails. I’m honestly surprised it isn’t higher.
A few times over the last few years, I sat down to try and clean it out. It had gotten so hard to find things, and so unwieldily, that Yahoo’s servers (Yahoo bought Rocket Mail about a year after they started) choked on it. I’m probably one of the only people in the world that pays Yahoo actually hard cash to have a Yahoo email address, because the free email simply couldn’t handle it. The first few times I sat down to fix this problem, I tried to find a technological solution. I looked at different 3rd party tools, from scrapers to POP3 clients. I came delicately close to inadvertently deleting the whole account one time. Nothing I found could do the job. Every time I went to fix it, something more important came up.
There’s an interesting life lesson in here somewhere, and that’s one of the reasons I chose to write about this. It is not the most critical thing in my life that this email address work well and get cleaned up. And, at any given time, there is zero chance that it ever will be the most important thing in my life. But it is the kind of task that can only be handled if it is treated as if it was the most important thing in one’s life - with concerted effort and an intense focus. That means that, unless I ever chose to intentionally sit down and address it - despite it not being the most important thing at that moment - it would never get done. It wasn’t going to get better on its own. And a future where I had, quite literally, a million unread emails was both entirely possible to contemplate and also kind of creepy. There is a fundamental difference in life between tasks which are important and those that are urgent. It’s not easy to balance the two.
Today, I have approximately 28,000 unread emails. That’s still a lot, and I will be continuing to put energy behind addressing it. But it’s only about 10-15% of the problem, and I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. My dream is to get back to the mythical zero inbox. I may not quite get there, and that’s OK, but if I can get under 1,000 I think I’ll declare a success. (It’s mostly about being able to find old things, and at that size, I can manually search if I need to).
What’s important in your life that isn’t urgent and likely never will be? Do you want to take care of it? If not, be gracious in defeat and move on. If you do, though, then when? As they say, no time like the present!