I opened an email account with Gmail in January of 2007.  In the past 19 months, not counting spam, I accumulated over 3200 emails (let’s see, that would be over 170 emails a month, 6-7 a day).  I know, I know, that’s a very modest number.  I know some people who deal with as many emails in a day as I see in a month.

But I succumbed to the Google mindset.  I told myself, “Self, your inbox has a terrific search feature, and no folders.  Don’t organize your email.”  In addition to that, for several months I used a desktop client to access mail from this account.  Hence, I lost all hope of ever seeing the final page of my inbox (at 50 per page, I’ll never get to 3257!).  Till today…

I used those fancy search features of Gmail (from:name in:inbox etc) to find and label mail, then I archived it as I labelled it.  Oh, and I deleted a lot too.  So now, my inbox of 3257 or so became an inbox of 1.  Supposedly that will increase my productivity.

I feel faster already.