You know how blogs work — a never-ending daisy-chain of links to new blogs with such wonderful ideas…
A few weeks ago, I was link-jumping during lunch and ran across You’ve got {too much} email! – Challenge Update 8 by Hilda of From Overwhelmed To Organized.
I had a “ding” moment reading through that first link and then back through the entirety of her email challenge.
Don’t treat email any differently from how you treat physical stuff.
This resonated with me on so many levels — as a user with 10,000+ emails in her primary email account, as an organizer striving to implement and improve organizing systems, and also as a professional archivist.
As A User
I have over 10,000 emails going back over five years.
I’m also getting married next year — how, exactly, do I manage not just that bulk, but the eventual process of adding a new email account that will have my married name?
If I can weed out the junk, then tackling this challenge actually becomes feasible.
As An Organizer
My current email system isn’t bad — I’ve made use of the Labels feature Gmail provides. {I also had a near melt-down when they recently added their own categories and started trying to automatically apply those to all my incoming mail. Bad Google, bad. >_<}
And yet…I have about 20 different labels and even more nested labels. I can locate any given email fairly quickly but that’s just too much. The system has become too complex and no longer meets my current needs.
As An Archivist
The big discussion in my field right now is all this digital stuff. How do we save emails and websites and memos and all those World documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets that drive the modern workplace?
It’s basically all the same kind of stuff businesses and institutions have always used, but the digital format posses new challenges.
And what do I do in my own life? How do I save these emails for the future? How do I know what’s important and what isn’t? What do I weed and what do I keep?
The answer?
Don’t treat email any differently from how you treat physical stuff.
This is where we go wrong. It’s so easy to save the digital stuff. That’s why it so quickly becomes overwhelming. We have the ability to save it, so we do. We don’t go through the natural weeding process mankind has always performed on its physical possessions.
So now it’s time to take my professional training and apply to it Real Life: start processing that email.
I’ve gotten started and I’ve deleted over 2,000 emails, the majority of which had no labels, haven’t been touched since their primary use came to an end, and are completely lacking in context or historical value.
Pretty good start, wouldn’t you say?
Coming soon, part two: Processing Outside the Archive.
Bookish Southern Belles 