Up next: an e-mail fast?

My family likes to joke about my father’s garage. It is a foreboding place, packed to the hilt with boxes and boxes of stuff that predates Richard Nixon, and he declares he “needs” all of it. The garage is a source of constant humor in my family. I’ve long thought I didn’t inherit my dad’s packrat ways, and in terms of material things I think I do OK in that regard, but I’m learning I am a packrat when it comes to online stuff.

With a cross-country move coming up, it is time for me to start consolidating and packing. Not the house – it’s a little early for that. But because I am at some point going to lose my MU e-mail account, and because I’ve been annoyed with the spamage on Yahoo! Mail, I decided to declare endless war on spam and make the switch to Gmail this weekend.

This means migrating a lot of saved emails to Gmail, so I started with my Yahoo! account. And it’s amazing the stuff I have sitting around.

A receipts from an Amazon purchase from 2003, just in case I didn’t get that book (I did). Registrations for extended warranties that have long since expired on purchases I don’t even remember making. A recipe for cranberry meatballs that I know well enough to make from memory.

But I “need” all this stuff, so why not?

Dr. Clyde Bentley once did an one-week e-mail fast here at MU, and it was hilarious to read the reactions when he asked them to fax or (God forbid) snail mail him something instead of sending it through the intertubes. The process taught him a lot, he says, about how integrated e-mail is into his life and how difficult it is to “do” life without it, if only because of others’ expectations of you in a connected world.

As much as others might suffer were I to try the same thing, I might suffer more. E-mail has become more than a communication tool for me. It is now my own personal Public Storage facility where I file away information that I might need later. I don’t print receipts anymore, I just save the e-mail. And pity the poor colleague who sent me a journal submission manuscript to look over three months ago (I am SO sorry!). It’s there on my “to-do” list, of course – it’s in my inbox, not a nasty little subfolder – but it doesn’t seem to get done.

Since I’m migrating to Gmail, perhaps it’s time to set some new rules for myself. Like print out what I need and delete the e-mail, and don’t keep any any messages in my account longer than a week. My guess is that email is more functional when it’s used more like the telephone and less like that answering machine where you have 16 saved messages and have to wade through old stuff to get to the new stuff.

If anyone has any ideas for keeping my inbox lean and mean, I’ll take ‘em. In the meantime, I need to get back to my garage. Dad would be so proud.