So, a coworker named Denise – otherwise known as “Senior Staff” – recently alerted me to a new possibility in my life. Something wonderful enough to rank up there with Cadbury chocolate and corn on the cob and curry. Ooh, and bonfires. (Thought I should throw in that last one to prove not all the things I consider “wonderful” are food…many, but not all.)
New possibility: Email Bankruptcy.
First, I should note that when Denise-aka-Senior-Staff initially started talking about “email bankruptcy,” I totally thought she was making up the term. I thought she was a genius. And, well, I still think she’s a genius – because hey, she taught me how to Mail Merge using Excel. And while I still hate Excel, turns out the whole Mail Merge thing ain’t so hard. But anyway, credit for coining the term “email bankruptcy” goes to Lawrence Lessig or Dr. Sherry Turkle. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know for certain.
What Wikipedia (and now I-via-Denise) does know is that email bankruptcy is a term “used to identify or explain a decision to close an email account, or to delete all messages older than a certain date, due to an overwhelming receipt of garbage messages, compared to legitimate messages.”
Wow. My Yahoo mail account is currently jumping up and down at this new Inbox-slimming possibility. I figure I probably shouldn’t try the whole email bankruptcy thing using my work email. ‘Cause, you know, I’d like to keep my job – at least until I either a) pull a bank job or b) convince someone to marry me and let me write full-time. But I am seriously considering giving it a go with my personal email.
Wikipedia explains the process of declaring email bankruptcy like this: “During the act of declaring email bankruptcy, a message is usually sent to all senders explaining the problem, that their message has been deleted, and that if their message still requires a response they should resend their message.”
Sounds easy enough, right. I mean, hey, if the Rolex people truly want me to buy a new watch, they’ll email me again, right?
Either way, the possibility of this liberating move has me celebrating tonight. ‘Course, in the time it took me to write this blog post, I probably got seven or eight or nineteen more emails…
~Melissa
~Melissa
p.s. I’m off to Florida this week! Beautiful, sunny, warm (I hope) Florida for a My Book Therapy retreat with award-winning authors Susan May Warren and Rachel Hauck. I’m planning to return to Iowa, but you never know…the coast just might hold me captive...
Comments 6
MTagg,
You are hilarious. I’m trying to get my chapters finished, but had to take a cyber break…that is after all the kids requests….
Looking forward to seeing you at DT!
Hehe, thank you, Alena. Yay, I’m going to see you so soon!!
Sigh, my inbox is now over 1000 messages. I need to spend a couple hours…or days sorting through them, but it seems to shift to the bottom of my priority list. Michael Hyatt manages to keep his inbox down to a manageable number. One of these days…
Looking forward to seeing you, MTagg!!
LJ, you are a prime candidate for Email Bankruptcy!!!
So, when I was Googling “email bankruptcy” I came across a template for declaring email bankruptcy following an extended maternity leave. I thought, “Here’s my answer for my work email. I just need to get pregnant, have a baby, go on maternity leave…and then I will have a perfect excuse for declaring email bankruptcy at work.” However, because I prefer to do things the moral way, I should probably get married first. Which, all things considered, is quite a lot of effort to go through (especially considering the whole labor and delivery aspect) just so I can justifiably declare email bankruptcy…
Can’t wait to see you! Florida, here we come!
Oh, ladies. I have you all beat. But the number is too horrific to post. I’m an email hoarder! Probably in need of an intervention, too.
What you need to do, Jenness, is watch the above Michael Scott video over and over and practice saying, “I declare bankruptcy” just like him. Only, insert the word “email.” This will build up your readiness to free your Inbox from its chains…