Chances are, if you emailed me and I never got back to you it’s because I’ve “Read” it already: I used everybody’s friend “Mark All As Read.”
Some people keep their unopened emails for years, I think Edmund has thousands of unopened mails. But it drives me nuts. I prefer to have an empty inbox; no new mails. When I get busy or go on vacation my emails start piling up, 200, 300, 500 == crazy-making. When that happens, I scan over the new emails (50 at a time) and click “Mark All As Read.” If I find an email I want to actually read, I will keep it Unread, causing me to juggle between Read and Unread and click and unclick boxes. When I’m done sorting through 500 messages, I might have 20 new emails left I want to read. And then I read them.
Because the process of selecting emails I want to read includes me quickly scanning over 50 emails at a time, sometimes I miss an email or two. When I am following up with someone, I make sure to double-check that they haven’t already replied to my previous message. Just so I don’t look like a jerk.
I use GMail’s labeling system to highlight emails from sources important to me: Facebook, Twitter, BitchyPoo/Love & Hisses, Edmund, My Mom. For instance, I love getting notifications from Facebook. I don’t read them all. I click on the FaceBook label and check out any Unread items I might have missed from the website, when I’m done checking, I mark the rest as Read. I don’t want to miss anything.
So if you’ve sent an email to me and I never got back to you, I might have Marked it as Read by mistake. Sorry about that. I also might have read it, intended on getting back to you and then got distracted by something shiny. And that’s a whole other blag post.
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