They say that the first step is admitting that you have a problem - so “I have a problem”

What’s my problem?  e-mail.

I’m sitting here in the office looking at my inbox and I have about 20 messages on average that are always unread.  Now, in the grand scheme of things 20 messages probably isn’t a lot.  But, I’ve never had this issue before.

It used to be that I read just about anything that was sent to me - I was just so happy that I was cool enough to even get e-mail that I really didn’t care what it was, it was an e-mail - to me!  Yay me!

But where I am now - I get so much utter crap that it actually feels morale sapping to open some of my e-mail.  I’m not talking spam either, just overall crap that people either think I care about or want me to care about.  Unlike before when I thought it was just awesome to even get an e-mail, I now triage my e-mail and based on sender and subject line decide what to open when.  There’s a few levels in the triage:

  1. Important stuff that if I ignore will come back to bite me in the ass.
  2. Stuff from The Wife.  Besides being from The Wife, she’s good and rarely sends me drivel or stuff I dread opening :)
  3. Stuff that’s important to me that the people I work for or with wouldn’t see as important
  4. Other work stuff
  5. Non-work stuff that keeps me from going insane (interchangable with 3 and 4 as needed)
  6. Stuff from people that I don’t like or don’t want to deal with.  Also here is stuff that people think I care about or should care about but that I really don’t care about.
  7. Spam.

The Spam filters here are pretty robust - I don’t get a whole lot of spam, so that’s not an issue.  It’s the level 6 stuff.
This is the stuff that I tend to dread when they arrive.  It’s stuff that as much as I would really like to ignore it I can’t completely because every once in a while there’s either something I need to deal with or should at least be aware of.  The trouble is that I dread getting this crap so much that I just don’t bother to open it unless I have to.  As a result it either clutters up my inbox until I get tired of it and delete it, or get asked why I didn’t respond and provide input.

Even worse is that I can’t figure out how to articulate to many of these folks that I just don’t care about most of what they send me, nor can I really tell them that I typically just ignore their e-mails unless I absolutely have to.

So, I have a problem.  In the grand scheme of things it’s not a big problem, but it’s a problem.