I must be receiving around 50 emails (not including spam) everyday. Quite a few are from free software mailing lists that I have subscribed. Some are from Zyxware.com in the form of automated notifications about actions on the site. It is not practical to go through all emails and I normally leave those mails that I cannot take action on or those mails that do not have subject lines worth looking at or those emails that do not require any action as unread. Over a course of time this accumulates and I end up spending hours at a stretch to clean up my inbox once in a while. Today was such a day.
I had around 650 unread mails in my inbox when I started and around 4 hours after I don't have any. No, I did not read all of them. I read some of them and the remaining I marked as read. I glance through the subject line and decide that my earlier decision about a later action was probably wrong given the fact that nothing happened in spite of the inaction. Some times I come across mails that definitely required action and I normally take the required action when I do such clean ups. Today I took action on several mails.
Now I can look happily at my clean inbox with a feeling of contentment that I don't have any pending work as far as my emails are concerned. I totally dislike the feeling when I have a lot of things pending and I like to crunch through them all and have an empty to-do list. I don't have an empty to-do list yet but my inbox is empty and I am happy.
