Click to Delete

Today, there were 836 email in my Inbox. Ten of those were unread. The rest needed to be dealt with accordingly....but why hadn't I dealt with them up to this moment?

There's a kind of push-pull about email--I wonder which ones might be really important. Which ones are 'keepers' and which ones are trash. I wonder about my email like I'm a member of the Bloomsbury Set, and that my Letters will someday be Collected.

Wake up. I don't think I'm ever going to make that level of Writer.

I started going thru the email, page after page, adding contacts to my address book that I should have added when I received the new email, but didn't for some reason. I looked at the Subject lines, and decided if particular emails were worth saving or needed to be 86'd. I had a lot of junk in there--one-word responses to single questions, various Google alerts, various other email from subscriptions or mailing lists that I was done reading.

Why didn't I delete them after reading them? Oh, there was probably something in them that I thought I'd get back to--something worth blogging about at the moment that was deletable by midday. Only I totally forgot to delete it.

So I started clicking off posts. I'd click the entire twenty-five per page, then unclick the ones that appeared to be worth saving. Then Delete.

In about an hour, I was down to 254 email in my Inbox. Ten still unread.

I got rid of 592 Previously Read email.

My Sent email box, however, remains jam-packed. I have no idea how many email in that box are necessary or not necessary. I imagine that by now most of them are not necessary. As I said, I doubt I'm going to end up one of those writers whose works are all collected for a library somewhere. Heck, I'll be lucky enough if I ever finish anything that will end up in a library. So I'm sure I can simply check through most of what I've sent, with the execption of current email, and delete most of that too.

But there's little incentive to delete. When you've got 1GB free storage, and you're only using 3%, why delete?

Then again, why keep them?

In lots of ways, it feels like it's time to let go of some things, as much as it has felt right doing a bit of bookkeeping and straightening out my financial picture.

Talking with one of my friends this afternoon, she and I realised that it's been almost a full year since the company her husband (and lots of the husbands of our friends)worked for closed its doors. There are only a few friends still around, but even among them, things are different. Life has changed for lots of us this past year in lots of ways. Most moved. Many had babies. Others, like me, started new careers of some kind or another.

Steady Eddie mentioned that, perhaps, it felt like things were ending because, on another level, Summer is officially over. In a matter of weeks, the air will begin to turn cold, and we'll have to turn the heat on and break out the coats again.
It is that, and more.

Maybe deleting all that email was a way of making room for more. Sure, there was plenty of room, but there's really no need to keep around stuff that's lost its significance.

Besides, I kept the emails that were important.

So tomorrow, as a break between doing other things, I'll start to delete stuff from the Sent box. And see about clicking the feature that will ask me if I want to save the email I just wrote, rather than automatically saving things that aren't worth saving in the first place.

Who knows what it's all really about...we'll see...