inbox zero…?
i emptied out my email inbox!
inflows and outflows
one way to think about getting rid of emails is like a bathtub, where the inbox is the bath, the emails are the water, and you’ve got an inflow (the tap) and an outflow (the drain)[1]
inflows are the emails that come in. you can reduce these by doing things like unsubscribing to emails (search “unsubscribe”), making filters, or properly marking emails as spam
outflows are how you get rid of emails. this is either deleting them, or moving them to another folder/tag[2]. sometimes you’ll need to take an action first, like replying to the email. you can make this faster by bulk deleting (e.g. everything from a certain sender or everything with “your order”), or learning keyboard shortcuts
avoidance
i could technically achieve inbox zero by like, making a filter that sends all the emails to the trash and deleting every existing email. this would be easy but defeats the point, which was to practise (a) acting on emails instead of ignoring them and (b) looking emails dead in the eye and deleting them without regret
i know i’ve been avoiding these emails. they weren’t piling up because i didn’t think they were worth the effort, which would have been a rational deliberate decision, but because i’d avoided even trying to make that judgement. they probably weren’t that important, but i hadn’t even looked and consciously decided that was the case, and instead had the decision made for me by avoidance. it is not fun to realise that not making decisions is making a decision
also, the emails probably not being important is crucial. it struck a good balance between being safe while also being a challenge[3]
the challenge being to encounter something emotionally disregulating, then regulate myself enough that i could make a rational decision. one where i’m as present as i can be, that’s congruent with who i am and who i want to be. and the regulation has to involve real processing of the emotion eventually (even if slightly delayed to a more appropriate time)
in the end, a lot of the emails were nothing! marketing emails that were easy to go, “nah, not interested” and unsubscribe and mass delete. but there were a few that reminded me why this was a challenge: emails from people no longer in my life, marketing for a person i used to be (and can’t go back to), missed opportunities, mistakes, problems that got bigger when ignored
but i did it :)
what’s next
i don’t know whether i’ll keep my inbox at zero, because it wasn’t about the number. i wanted to know that i could do it if i wanted to. and if i didn’t it was because i chose not to for reasons that felt grounded at the time
more broadly, i want to keep working at emotional regulation[4]. it is incredible(-y frustrating) to think about the ways this has affected my life[5]. but hey. i’ve now chipped away at one thing. i can chip away at a few more (at a rate which is frustratingly safe and sustainable with room for failure and the ability to change my mind at any time)
footnotes
this analogy is from the book Thinking in Systems, a book that was recommended to me as helpful for a certain kind of autistic struggle with the world. i’d say that if you already have an understanding of big systems from a different angle (e.g. systemic racism), then it won’t blow your mind and might be occasionally too liberal. but it is fun to be presented with the shape of a system and be like “oh! it’s like this and that, and i hadn’t thought about those things being the same shape before!” ↩︎
which pedants might say is technically equal to deleting from one place and creating in another ↩︎
i’ve tried to do some other things to confront avoidance, and it turns out that going too hard and fast about it can create more problems than it solves ↩︎
it’s funny to have what’s basically my first therapy goal after quitting therapy. (as in one to one therapy with a talk therapist). which i don’t want to rule out for the future, but i want to be careful to not fall into a “you’re the expert and i’m broken” **cough** thing again. which is likely contributed to not having well defined therapy goals, which contributed to the whole process not being as effective as it could have been ↩︎
e.g. reading! it’s not an uncommon problem but i haven’t heard anyone else describe their specific problem with not being able to read as reading a bit, then getting so overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings that they’re unable to continue ↩︎