Is it just ME?
Or is your email inbox as essential as your handbag?
LAST week the death of email was gleefully predicted. In a world where staff can spend the equivalent of a day a week tending their inboxes, bosses claim cutting email down, or even eradicating it, would boost productivity and give workers their lives back.
Are they mad? My inbox is worth more to me than my address book, diary, and mobile phone rolled into one. It’s the first place I go to retrieve old love letters, work contacts, bills, dates of friends’ birthdays, you name it.
It’s my virtual handbag — battered, overflowing, unfashionably out of date (I still use Hotmail) — but I couldn’t live without it.
If I dig deep enough through the mess of old tissues and lipstick and boiled sweets, who knows what riches I will find. Maybe the email address of a famous novelist who was kind enough to drop me a line, or a romantic date I’d forgotten.
Shamefully I have over 20,000 emails in my inbox, some dating back 10 years. And it makes me nervous to lose any of them. The minute I press ‘delete’, I know I will regret it.
I live in awe of a younger col-
I keep drafts of all the emails I’ve never had the courage to send
league who never has more than five emails in her inbox. In contrast, I am an unapolgetic maximalist. But it’s getting harder to defend my e-habit. Many companies already curb out-of-hours email.
A housing trust in Cheshire is even naming and shaming its highest email users in a monthly league table.
This seems pointlessly cruel. The world depends on us inbox fans. Test me. I bet I could find you the perfect facialist or roofer, in seconds . . .
Something I won’t be sharing, however, is the contents of my drafts folder — the darkest pocket of my virtual ‘handbag’. Here I keep drafts of emails I’ve never had the courage to send. Furious rants to exes. Fantasy letters of resignation.
My one fear is being hacked and the contents revealed to friends and family. ‘But she seemed such a nice woman,’ they would exclaim, puzzled.
So, yes, it’s risky being an email hoarder. You live on your nerves. But I’d argue it’s a small price to pay for having your whole life — quite literally — at your finger tips.