Empty inbox experience: Joe Hass

Aug 6, 2007

Joe Hass wrote me today about his experience reading Bit Literacy and then using Gootodo to clear his inbox. With his permission, I've posted Joe's note, and his screenshot of his now empty inbox, below:

As of Friday morning at 3:05 a.m., I had an inbox with 16,300 unread messages.

I woke up for reasons unclear. Since I was unable to fall back asleep, I broke out my copy of Bit Literacy. I happened to stop the night before on the chapter of e-mail. So I picked up there. After about 15 minutes, I thought I'd start going through my e-mail (I use gmail).

I started searching and moving things to labels and archiving them and added filters to move stuff immediately to the archive. In three hours, I went from 16,300 to 4,000 unread messages.

But I was motivated. When I got to my office, I wanted to keep making filters and deleting stuff and the like.

By 12:15, I was done.

It was incredible. It was so stunning to me. I had written off the idea of ever having a totally empty inbox.

I've signed up for gootodo, and I've started using that as well (what makes it great for me is I can send e-mail using my text message plan, which lets me add stuff on the fly. As an ADD kid, I get stuff popping into my brain out of the blue. It's great.

• IN: Bit Literacy
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