Inbox Flood

Inbox 14K Total

Inbox
13K Unread

Early last week my Gmail inbox reached 24.4K total and 22.2K unread. It had been 2 weeks since loosing Merlin and I was tentatively reengaging a few of the many things I'd pushed to the back burner and turned the heat off the day Merlin got sick.  That day I discovered several items requiring attention like sympathy notes, blog comments, notes from my sisters, a thank-you/keep it up note from a Joystory reader, requests to review, notifications from Net Galley, and notification the as yet to be used domain name for my intended online business page was expiring this weekend.

Realizing there were likely to be many more such prompted me to start slogging through the flood of 150-300 per day not counting the ones I've filtered to skip the in-box. Well that and the realization that I have to fix this inbox issue before I go live with any of my online business goals--self pub, copywriting, gift store and more.

The flood was created by following the suggestion of the AWAI copywriting course to collect junk mail to study by purposefully subscribing to email lists in niches that interested me.  Turned out I was drawn to a lot of niches--health and fitness, (diet and nutrition, naturopathic medicine, exercise) self-transformation, Spiritual paths, Law of Abundance, and hypnosis, meditation, and Brain Wave Entrainment mp3, self-pub, marketing, web site creation, promo and maintenance....

AWAI itself sends me 6-10 per day.

I began the AWAI copywriting course to learn how to self-promote but decided I might as well consider soliciting clients as a way to support my true passion of story and poetry.

I should have been creating filters and labels from the get go so the copywriting samples were either skipping the inbox or easily archived.  Same for the task list to keep the personal, urgent, time sensitive, blog and social media, business or commitment related separate from the many 'interesting, worth a more leisurely look sometime.'

I've been slogging away at it daily for nearly two weeks now and still haven't cut it in half from its crest.  Discouraging. Tho I should keep in mind the 150-300 per day are still rushing is as I slog.

Eventually I'll need to unsubscribe from many lists but I'm not taking the time to evaluate them individually for usefulness.  So, except for a few that have pissed me off, I've just been creating filters and labels then going down the label list and archiving everything sometimes attaching an email I need to tend to or just want to look at closer to a task.

But that is flooding my task list which I've never broke up into themed lists so that needs to be done next. Tho I'm considering whether I should set aside the inbox until I've created at least a few that separate the urgent and the action/reply required from the 'check-this-out-when-you-get-a-minute'.

Of course I didn't remain in the analytic mindset while reading these copywriting samples.  I got caught up in the freebie trap, subscribing to new lists to get the free, PDFs, video, mp3, tutorials, email lesson series, webinars, replays of teleseminars...

And I've bought a few products, most of which are more of the same.

Where has the time been coming from to read, watch, listen to all of these?

Or, more precisely, what have I given up doing while I do that?

My counselor says that I busy myself with inconsequential things as a distraction from things I'm avoiding thinking about.