You guys, I have a new….email address.

I'm writing about it because it still has that new car smell. The inbox has only a few emails in it. It still seems possible that I could maintain inbox zero, which is actually a lie, but the glimmer of that future is beautiful. My personal inbox is 482 emails that all serve to remind me about how I am a bad friend/record keeper/person.

I thought I could write a love letter to this new inbox, but the best I have managed so far is this: When I look at you, I don't feel a rising sense of panic.

Remember back in the crazy days of the 90s, when we would just willy nilly create usernames and email addresses for basically no reason other than self-expression? It was great. I would just randomly move to a new account whenever I was annoyed with the current one. I would abandon accounts to the spammers who were slowly devouring my inbox.

Then gmail happened and a lot of things about email sucked less. But the fact is I started this gmail account ELEVEN YEARS AGO (just looked it up, because looking that up is way more fun that writing). I WAS BARELY HUMAN THEN. I signed up for this account in an Apple store at the Mall of America because one of my friends needed to buy or return something and I was bored. And here we are eleven years later. And I have eleven years of email sitting there.

This shiny new inbox is giving me a chance to flex my new adulting muscles. Look at me clearing out all my starred emails!

I'm filtering the hell out of what comes into my inbox, and not like I used to. Used to be I'd freak out about all the newsletters in my inbox, select them all, build one giant filter that catches all of them, and then move them to the bacon folder. Don't do that. One newsletter = one filter. I delete things that I don't actually need, which I know gmail hates but I don't, because of this shit:

May 1 – Have you heard about my event? Sneak preview!
May 3 – An announcement of my event!
May 5 – Hey, register now!
May 9 – If you loved yourself you already would have signed up.
May 13 – It's almost sold out don't wait!
May 17 – It's sold out!
May 21 – Still sold out!
May 25 – Are you ready for our sold out event??
May 31 – Tomorrow's the day!
June 1 – Today's the day!
June 2 – Yesterday was the day!
June 6 – Remember that event?
June 9 – Here's another freebie from my event!

And so on, I could write you a 300-part email marketing sequence because IT HAPPENS SO MUCH. If I need to know about this event in five years when I'm rich and sitting in my Maserati on the beach while getting a massage and drinking three blue drinks out of cups made of different tropical fruits, one of these emails will suffice. I'm going to hazard that I won't be lovingly paging through every single one, remembering all the good times I had with my archive button. I need those neurons for managing the three cocktails.

Anyway, this is way too many words about a new email inbox, so I guess to sum up, here's what I'm doing:

1) Keeping, like, NONE emails in my inbox (that's a technical term for kinda sorta lazy people inbox zero, closer to actually about 10).
2) Deleting all that terrible shit.
3) Sending all those newsletters I can't resist to well-organized and useful bacon folders.
4) Putting all the change I find on the ground in my Maserati fund.
5) Bragging on the internet.