Google Made Me Do It...

A few weeks ago, I posted a status on Twitter about how I was vowing to never abuse my drafts folder ever again. I abuse my Gmail in many ways, but probably my worst Gmail habit is using my drafts folder as an electronic junk drawer. Rarely are any of the items in the folder actual drafts that need to be sent, but I recently I was looking for a copy of a Eng 101 handout and found an email that I had actually drafted to send out months ago that had been buried in my drafts folder and had never actually gotten sent.

While I will take full credit for many of my less than productive and organized habits, I blame this one on Google. They make it too easy for me to abuse my Gmail and use it for non-email related purposes.* In some ways I miss the lack of functionality and limited storage capacity of Missouri State's old Bearmail system.** With that email account, I literally ran out of space a couple of times a semester, so I had to be vigilant about deleting old emails and prioritizing what I really needed to keep. I couldn't email myself multiple drafts of a paper and store them all on my email.

Somewhere along the way, I got a Gmail account and instantly fell in love. I didn't have to worry about Bearmail being down or getting overrun with spam. Most of all, though I didn't ever have to delete email or empty the trash ever again.

I instantly developed some bad habits. I stopped distinguishing between important and unimportant email, but more importantly, I began using Gmail as a replacement for disks and flashdrives. Early on this wasn't really a problem because I didn't have that many documents that I had emailed to myself and digging through a handful of emails was so much nicer than having to constantly regret deleting something because of space concerns. I liked that the drafts folder was a convient place to put attached files without cluttering my inbox, so I started putting stuff there and never really stopped.

Fastforward 6 years... Same bad habits as above, plus add:

• emails that I drafted but never listed a recepient because they were responses that I knew I could never send
• hyperlinks that I'm sure I'm going to need in the future
  
• reminders for everything from meeting times to grocery lists
• files that I emailed to myself for later access but failed to include a specific subject line***
• emails that I used as templates for things like responding to student proposals
• nearly 100 blank emails****
  

When I went into my drafts folder to look for something a couple of weeks ago, I knew that I had to work on cleaning out my email. Even Google's wonderful search capabilities were being hindered by the sheer volume of email I had kept. My problem is how to tackle this reorganization of email without becoming completely overwhelmed.

I haven't gotten my email completely organzied yet, but I did make some progress. I completely deleted nearly 6,000 emails in the last two weeks and created some filters and labels to help sort the new mail, but I'm still quite a ways away from undoing 6 years of abuse. I really wish I could set up a feature on Gmail that would say things like "is this really a draft?" or "do you really mean archive?" or better yet, I need gmail to create an option to have all email that I create but don't send to self-destruct in 30 days.

I know once again relying on Google to fix my problem isn't really fair, but seriously 7,000+ MB of space is not helping me be a more organzied person.

*Yes, I realize that it is not Google's responsiblity to keep me organized, and that they create many other tools that could theoretically help me get more organized, but if my students don't ever have to take personal responsiblity, why should I? :)
**To clarify here, I mean the one that couldn't automatically empty the trash, didn't have a spam filter, and often ran out of space if you emailed too many Word documents (pictures were not even an option). That system didn't even warn you that you had run out of space, you had to verbally tell people that you tried to email them and got a message back that they were out of space.
***I have tried to stop doing this in the last couple of years, but have since found that I my solution (i.e. 170 handout) is not much more help.
****seriously, I guess when I hit compose and then get distracted or decide to do something else and Google asks if I want to discard, I subconsciously save them all. Sometimes, these have an addressee, but no subject line or message. Most of them are just blank.