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Unpopular opinion: hitting 20,000 unread emails taught me more about myself than any self help book
Last Tuesday I glanced at my phone and saw the badge said 20,000 unread emails. Twenty thousand. I remember when I bragged about inbox zero back in 2016, like it was some kind of personality trait. Somewhere between a job change in 2019 and a baby in 2021, I just quit deleting stuff, and now I have a searchable record of every coupon, receipt, and newsletter I never read. Here is my hot take: inbox zero is a scam sold to us by people who do not have real jobs. Nobody ever lost a client because they could not find an email from 2018, but I have lost whole afternoons trying to keep a clean inbox. I now treat it like a filing cabinet that never gets emptied, and honestly my stress went down when I stopped fighting it. So tell me, am I a slob or is everyone else just wasting their time with folders?
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piperwhite9d ago
My dad had this filing cabinet in his office that was basically a graveyard of papers from the 80s and he refused to throw anything out. When he died we found his passport from 1974 in there, which was weirdly comforting, like a time capsule of a whole life. Your inbox is basically that cabinet, and nobody ever got hurt by keeping too much paper around.
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