Various Lies

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Mental Health Day

I had a cold this week. Got to work Monday morning, feeling a bit dozy. By 10am I was sniffly; by 11 I was feverish, so they sent me home.

I went home.

I think I died around 3PM. Thankfully I'm like The Highlander, so I came back alive again. Just to feel shit for the next 36hrs.

Today I feel better, but dozy.

So, went through my LIST OF THINGS TO DO. It was 40 THINGS long.

It is now only 12 THINGS long. Unfortunately, all the easy THINGS like, "Ask Brad & Rebecca about new logo", are gone, and I'm left with THINGS such as, "Write JAMIA paper", and "Write AFSA Grant".

That kind of sucks. But at least they stand out on the page now, y'know?

And I was going over my mailbox limit. Again. I used to fight to keep my inbox down to 50 emails, then it was 100 emails. Then 150. Then I noticed that I had hundreds upon hundreds of emails stored in 15 folders and 35 sub-folders. No wonder I could never find anything! So, I instituted a new regime: be more brutal, and cut the crap. Plus, stop saving every wack-a-loon dumb email funny people send me. And, relax the inbox quota to 200.

Well, it hit 300 today. So, a fresh cup of coffee, and an hour's dedicated administrative brutality clearing later I'm down to 207...shit...208 in my inbox, and had the unfeasibly satisfying experience of deleting 5 folders and 700 old emails. Ahhhh...damn near 75-100MB of shite off my account I hope.

Right.

now what... 3hrs to go.... what gets cleaned next...

5 comments:

Genomic Repairman said...

I always feel guilty deleting emails, like somehow it will likely come back to bite me in the ass. It usually does! But its fun. I know PI's who have notebooks that no one has laid eyes on for like 20 some odd years but they refuse to move them out of the lab at least into storage if not the trash.

tideliar said...

I come a family of pack rats...pots of keys that have no locks, bookshelves with books still stuck together from when dad's homemade wine exploded in 1984... very different from being a slob...just keeping everything.

I've conditioned myself to break that mould :) I find myself relaxing from time-to-time, but then it is time for a major purge. The only emails I'm religious about keeping (because I've had my ass burnt (even more so in Administration which is deadly cut-throat and back-stabby) are work related. Keep all the ones where you get praise, keep the ones where someone tries to fuck you over...

microbiologist xx said...

Damn, sounds like you went on a spree.
I tend to keep way too many emails. My excuse is just that I am lazy. I mean to delete the emails, but I don't get around to it (because, you know, it's sooooo hard) and in the mean time, I get new emails causing old emails to get bumped to a the next page, a.k.a. the black hole of emails. Then of course, I forget all about them and start the process all over again.
Ugghhh. I need to delete some emails.

tideliar said...

I have Entourage as my email client now (I like it too! Microsoft made a product that works!) And it doesn't use pages. So emails from months or a year or so ago are just way down at the bottom of the page. It groups by day/week/month/older so the tabs are fairly easy to negotiate.

So...emails can drop off the screen, but there's less of an emotive 'page divide black hole'.

Damned useful and a nice bit of...API or GUI or whatever the hell it is. I think 'Thunderbird'. Mozilla's email client has the same set up.

microbiologist xx said...

I go back and forth with the mail client. I was using iMail, which I like, but with all my email accounts converging into one place, things started to get out of hand fast. I thought at least if I check them individually then I have at least one level of organization. :) Obviously this isn't really panning out, so It might be time to revisit the mail client.