A Digital “Spring Cleaning”
Zero Inboxes, Clearing Histories, Triaging my Downloads Folder
I have been on a journey to clean up my digital spaces, ranging from my email, recommendation feeds and my local storage. I quickly talk about stuff I have done so far, and highlight things that I plan on doing in the coming days and weeks.
And already, I feel more peaceful with my digital content and feeds — in part because I feel a greater sense of control. Let me start with Zero Inboxes …
Zero Inboxes
My email inboxes were simply becoming this insurmountable walls of information that I was unable to scale. And it was getting depressing.
So I decided to confront it using a simple, well-known idea:
out of sight, out of mind
Fact: I do not care about all those emails that are marked as unread in my email inboxes. Even if my inbox did have an email that I actually cared about, it will be difficult for me to triage through all of my unread mail to weed out the useless stuff, and retain the important stuff.
So for both my outlook and gmail accounts, I did something simple:
I created backup folders (and I labeled them “InboxBackup”) and moved every piece of email from my inbox to InboxBackup — for both Gmail and Outlook accounts.
Here’s what my email inboxes look like today:
And the results are staggering.
First, I am able to be on top of my mail a lot better. When a piece of mail lands in my inbox, I triage it into one of these three buckets:
- “Ads/Offers/Junk”: I simply desk reject these, or unsubscribe from newsletters or Ad emails that I am not interested in. I have been unsub’ing from more newsletters than I could have imagined. This gives me a sense of control that I have been sorely lacking.
- “Super Important”: I keep these emails in my inbox for longer than one day, and typically relates to a long running project that I am working on. And if this project tends to run longer than one week, then that tells me that it is time to create a new folder for all mail related to that project and favorite/star that folder.
- “Worth Keeping”: These are emails from newsletters or sources that I care about. I typically open these, read through them, and triage them into folders that are not favorited/stared.
Second, I find that looking at my email is a lot more peaceful. Somehow, when there is less to look at, I am less stressed out. Go figure!
And third:
Email as a Project and Task Tracker
By focusing on triaging on new email, and sweeping my older messages under the metaphorical rug, my inboxes have become TODO and Project trackers.
I am slowly getting to a point where I do not rely on yet separate applications to track my Tasks and Projects. Funny how simplicity opens up multi-faceted use of email and inboxes.
What about all those backed-up inboxes?
That’s a fair question. Simple answer: I do not care about them.
Longer answer: If and when I have time to sort through even a fraction of them — when i have nothing better to do and want to be bored senseless — I will go triage through them.
Do I actually expect to do this? Maybe.
Do I actually expect to do this anytime soon? No.
Like I called about before: out of sight, out of mind.
Clearing Histories
My Medium Feed
After getting to Zero Inbox, I asked myself: “Why stop there?”
My email is just one information feed I deal with daily. Medium.com is another big one. But I have never enjoyed its recommendations — which seem to be skewed towards my reading history.
But the great thing about Medium is that it tells me why it is suggesting something. And I found that a lot of those suggestions are based on my reading history.
Fact: I like being exposed to new things. I love discovering new subjects and ideas. And so, using my reading history to feed me more of the same tends to get boring, repetitive and not worth my time.
At first, I wanted to simply block certain topics, like Crypto, Software Engineering, Javascript, React. After asking around on Reddit I realized that this was not possible. So I did the next best thing which worked like magic:
I cleared my reading history.
And I now clear it every 7–10 days.
This has forced topics that I was not exposed to before. Such atypical topics now show up on my Medium feed. Today, I follow and actively read stuff from: “History of Technology”, “Cooking”, “Espresso”, “Letters”, “Film” and “Cities”.
I also find that Medium is recommending ever more interesting topics, everyday:
It still overfits on stuff related to software. Like in the picture above, you can see stuff like “Data Analytics”, “Customer Experience” or even “Wordpress Web Development”. But at least now, I get suggestions like “Poetry” or “Space Exploration” or “Healthcare”.
Had I not cleared my history, I would not have read a whole lot of stuff from such topics. Clearing my reading history gave me a clean slate, and fresher set of topic recommendations. I like that.
Next Step: Google Search History
I am now considering a clear-out of my Google Search History. It feels like a bold, unthinkable move on my part. But is it really? #IDK
I still have not done it yet. But the fact that I am actually considering this with a high degree of seriousness deserved a mention in this post.
In fact, I wish that more internet platforms — esp. in social media, e.g., Twitter, Facebook — offered the ability to control a user’s information feeds and walls. A subject for another post.
An upcoming weekend project: Triaging My downloads folder
My downloads folder is a cacophony of things — some useful, a lot of it useless. And all the zero inboxing and history clearing has gotten me to think seriously about the baggage that I accumulate locally on my computers — not just in my digital clouds.
This one will be a major project and will require some time. But hopefully, it will free up space and make me focus on documents, projects and pictures that I have long forgotten that need my attention.
That’s all for now. Time for me to go start that Downloads folder.
