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September 5, 2004
I prefer to hold onto things, though don't mislabel me as a packrat. While I do maintain a collection of cherished items that I refuse to toss, those select items are few and take up little space. One example: my ticket collection of every major sporting event, concert, play or entertainment extravaganza that I have ever attended.
There is one area, however, where I purge with no regret: internal company e-mail. I love to delete e-mails, and at our company — as I'm sure at most other organizations — there is usually a surplus of ill-advised and unwanted e-mail to slay.
As for the contents of this electronic sludge, it is comically the same stuff all the time — just from different senders. The range of worthless e-mail categories is somewhat confined to these three topic areas: out of the office messages (vacation, leaving early or working at home); a bizarre e-mail thread that has little or no relevance to our jobs yet can be mildly interesting (Where were you when John Lennon died? What's your favorite '80s song? ; and an e-mail chain-letter that gets forwarded along by some well-meaning coworker ("FWD: Help Kids with Chronic Diarrhea by Forwarding This E-Mail to All Your Friends").
My e-mail strategy at work is easy to execute, yet deceptively complex: I save roughly 1 percent of all e-mails I receive. I act on e-mails when they arrive, deleting or printing them right then. My inbox never contains more than 25 e-mails. And I delete recklessly: I am extremely optimistic that I will never need certain types of e-mails again.
This sheer genius of this strategy, however, is based on one principle that has nothing to do with me. In fact, for my plan to work, I have to rely heavily on the laziness and inertness of my coworkers. By that, I mean that most of my coworkers rarely delete even the most deletable e-mails (is there some rational reason why they're saving that e-mail about some leftover bagels in the kitchen?). I use my coworkers — certain offenders, in particular — to enable my deletion habit: If I don't have a copy of an e-mail, I know they will. I'm what you would call a user. And I even have down perfect the spiel I use when I need a deleted e-mail. "Hey, ahh, do you have that e-mail that just came out about the new story we're adding?" I say. I'm very casual, almost upset that I had "accidentally" deleted it. "Yah, I must have accidentally deleted it."
And does it work. I never get bogged down in slogging back through screen after screen of unmanageable e-mails. I never have to worry about finding an e-mail two weeks after the fact because there's not a chance in hell that I've saved it. And no one ever comes to me looking for a six-month-old e-mail chain about songs from the '70s that rocked. But how do I sleep at night, one might ask? Usually on my left side.
In all fairness of disclosure, I must admit two things: 1. I have been burned by this purging strategy many times, though probably fewer than 50 in my eight years here at this company. That's not bad: just six or so times a year when I have had to go groveling to my coworkers. And, 2. I'm on the periphery of having full-blown OCDD-obsessive-compulsive deleting disorder.
So delete away, everyone. And don't worry: Someone, somewhere will have saved that e-mail you so desperately need. Trust me.
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