Buried under an avalanche of emails

Just two days into the change of seasons as I write this, I am on a spring-cleaning mission. Sure, we’re addressing the dust bunnies under our bed and the mess left by our college sons’ Christmas and spring break visits. But mostly, for me, it’s about cleaning up my email inbox, which has become a constant distraction.

I know my inbox is due for a cleaning because I have let a few actual important things slip through the cracks. If I take a day off, my “unread” fills up again and the emails in my “I’ll get around to that after a while” thought process get moved down, out of sight, out of mind and into email oblivion.

Remember how excited we used to be in the mid-1990s when we heard the “You’ve got mail!” from AOL? Now we stare at the little red dot that tells us “436 unread emails.”

Ryan Holmes, a Canadian tech entrepreneur, wrote: “Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.” He penned those words in 2012, and the volume of email since then has probably increased tenfold or twentyfold.

As publishers and editors, we get tons of emails from people wanting free publicity. Lots of people still think we all work for free, but we run free community newsletters. (Insert eye roll here.) So we currently have tons of messages out here in the Hill Country about our upcoming eclipse weekend at the local wineries. But few put their money where their marketing firms’ mouths are.

My favorites are the public relations “news releases,” like when Dairy Queen releases a new Blizzard flavor. I want to yell, sarcastically, “Stop the presses! Six-column, 200-point header that reads ‘Choco-Crunch new at DQ.’” 

But Lordy, there are so many other emails.

If you subscribe to your metro daily newspaper and get their morning news update, your email address is automatically added to their afternoon update, their evening update, their breaking news update, and perhaps sports, business and lifestyle updates. As a small newsroom that sometimes struggles to produce our single morning update, I wonder how they maintain them all.   

I get regular emails from Uber from that one time I used an Uber in San Francisco. There’s Austin FC, Warby Parker, Hilton, photo shops, Chevrolet, Apple and Tennis Express. Lots of emails come from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, historian blogs (do they still call them blogs?), and fellow community newspaper friends and acquaintances — and the latter I prioritize for sure.

If you’re an officer in your local Rotary or other civic club, you have an additional, unpaid part-time job and get LOTS of emails about those duties. 

During election season, our news organizations are suddenly the best friend of Biden, Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott and a host of other state and local candidates. Even if we’re not located in their district, they seem to find our email address. And the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton emails several times daily to boast about who he has sued. 

And don’t we all love emails from our insurance companies to tell us our rates, “after a market study,” are going up again.

Is there a solution to the madness? I recently found one that has helped in my Gmail account that shows 39,000 emails. I stumbled across a guy on Twitter who suggested creating an email filter that deletes anything that has the word “unsubscribe” in it. And you can create exceptions for ones from individual addresses, of course. Voila! I’m getting a lot less email. I do check my trash folder more often and have had to move a couple of things back into the main folder, but not many.

This is likely old news to anyone under age 50. But it reminds me of the title of that 1990s Robert Plant song, “I Can Breathe Again.” 

Many of our operations have our own email newsletters these days and, for sure, they are a great way to communicate. But a constant challenge to myself for my time management is just not to get so many that I drown in a sea of digital detritus. 

What I’m Reading

Emails, of course! 

Please connect on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads or X (@kenestencooke), or email me at ken@fredericksburgstandard.com.