marketing

I used to judge people for their overflowing inboxes. You know those screenshots where someone’s mail app shows a gargantuan unread count? I’d cringe wondering why they wouldn’t just deal with it. How hard is it to stay on top of your email?

Turns out: very hard.

I’m in year two of working for a startup, which has meant a lot of late nights and weekends with less time for small but important tasks like working out, laundry, and deleting D2C email pollution. In less than a year I went from inbox zero to inbox disaster. I’d try to clean up here and there, but the Gmail app on my phone is barely equipped for it, and even the desktop web made deep cleaning surprisingly painful. The power was there, it just took six or seven clicks and queries to reach it. It was so much harder than I expected that I built my own app to help (more on that another time). I’ve finally got it down from 14,500+ emails to 14 and I can breathe again, but I have a lot of thoughts about how I got here in the first place.