Ever since my institution migrated to Web Mail Plus (I like to call it wimp for short) I’ve made it a workplace priority to never have anything stored on it that I can’t store someplace else. From the beginning, with our institutional migration to this new system I’ve been critical of it. I have no faith in either the dependability or privacy of the new system. The old system I did have a measure of faith in because my email was stored on my server in my machine room, not 10 feet from where I sit now. Now my professional email lives in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a place I have never seen and managed by people I have never met. There is a batch of paperwork that has been signed which should give me a sense of security, but again, it was one batch of strangers signing documents with another batch of strangers and a very nebulous promise that nothing upsetting would occur from this transition. As it is, I have developed a series of reflexes based on my zero-trust model that I use with strangers, especially institutional strangers. My livelihood is far too valuable to trust to the likes of my coworkers and peers. It’s nothing against them, but it’s a mix of wariness and “If you want it done right, do it yourself” mentality that so far has kept me happy and things working well in my life.

These reflexes regularly lead me to a state of geek nirvana, something called Inbox Zero. It’s a state where your inbox is totally clean, utterly empty. Nothing is malingering, loitering, and filling your mind with a fog of worry that if there are items there, you are somehow missing something or you haven’t completed something. Mostly it’s the sense that if there is something in there, I haven’t attended to it properly and that sits on my mind. It’s a kind of annoying background noise that lowers my happiness and sense of order, a fog of doubt. While this fog of doubt doesn’t really upset me or negatively impact my life, it contributes to my general sense of irritation and it’s one of those little passengers that contribute to stress breakdowns and spiraling vortexes of rage that I sometimes get trapped in. By eliminating this fog from my environment, it’s one less little niggling thing to wear me down.

My professional email gets only a few broad categories of information sent to it, that I have to attend to:

• DBA Tasks – Highly structured task requests that usually include attached data. These almost always have a due date and a list of people to report to when the task is complete.
• Help Desk/Office – More nebulous, mostly people asking for things or issuing trouble-tickets over email. In our office there is no single way to issue a trouble-ticket, people can walk up and verbally deliver one, they can email it in, leave voicemail, or try to ambush us as we walk through the office doing other tasks.
• Organizational Chatter – Even more nebulous and needless are the myriad messages regarding the activities of the Trustees, Campus News, and little reminders sent out for events and/or meetings. I don’t claim they are worthless, but they are a kind of ‘hair that clogs the pipes’.
• Vendor Spam – Generalized and unfocused bullshit from vendors we have or have had relationships with. Mostly this stuff is meaningless dreck related to things we will never need or find useful or even care about. These usually include anything sent from Dell, or HP, or the “Who’s Who” people.
• Miscellaneous Bullshit – Very regularly I get meaningless messages from utter strangers with no content or worthless content. These are akin to email mosquitoes. They serve no real purpose, but there isn’t a reliable way to force them all into extinction. The best you can do is just swat them when they arrive.

So my strategies for handling these messages are as so:

• If a message is worthy and important and has some sense of a due-date I forward it to my Toodledo account, which creates a task of the email with the body of the message as the meat of the task and the subject as the task title. This pushes the tasks that should originally go to toodledo in that direction. One of the side-effects of our transition was a massive retardation when it came to workflow. Our old system was great and nobody understood how to use it. The new system just doesn’t have the wits and the fact that nobody gets it is rendered meaningless from its absence.
• If a message contains some hard nugget that I want to always retain I copy the relevant bits into an Evernote Note.
• Everything else is bullshit. I have trained my Mac Mail.app using its Bayesian filters to separate utter bullshit from possible bullshit, so I just dump whatever mail puts in Junk right out and then toss the rest out after giving it a cursory glance.
• If there is an item that isn’t task based, but does have a date – such as a meeting or some sort of event, I hover my mouse over the date parts and my Mail.app detects this and offers me a choice to create a new iCal Calendar Entry for that event. Talk about handy.

At the end of the day at best, or the end of the week at worst I should always be able to return to Inbox Zero. There is no reason to store items in the wimp, everything else can be sorted either into Evernote or Toodledo or the files taken out and placed in Dropbox with appropriate Finder comments attached. That all being said, I do store some things in my wimp account, mostly things that I probably should keep for documentations sake, especially if a coworker is going to wear their ass for a hat sometime in the future, it’s good to be at least a little prepared for those sorts of things. I principally store promises and protestations that something won’t ever happen again in my wimp account, and when they screw up, at least it’s handy there. Wimp glories in a 10GB quota. I use only a human-hairs worth of that quota and I have no desire to ever really make use of wimp beyond that. It’s a necessary evil, a funnel, not a bucket. I’m sure organizationally that bucks the conventions, as they wish it to be both a funnel and a bucket, but I have more faith in other buckets than what is in wimp itself.