Well, I’ve been at my new job for a week and it’s ok so far. One of the major changes it’s brought about in my life is that I have to be there between 7:30 and 8am. If you’ve spent a lot of time around me, you know how … surprising that may sound. It turns out it’s really not that bad, though the transition was a little rough.
Between that and turning 30, I’ve been trying to get into some better habits. One of them is keeping my inbox small. I’ve developed a bad habit over the last 10 years of just reading my inbox and letting messages pile up — just a couple of weeks ago it was 2600 messages and in the past it’s easily reached 5000 or more. So, took a two pronged approach.
Phase one was the nuke it from orbit. I moved every single message older than 7 days out of my inbox and into a folder called dmz. This approach is one I got from the 43 Folders: Inbox Zero series.
Phase two was the addition of a new mutt alias. I bound it to (shift-A), but that’s just something I had available.
The alias is this:
macro index "A" "<limit>~r >7d\n<tag-pattern>~r >7d\n"
Basically, it limits the view to only show messages older than 7 days and tags them all as well. In my inbox, I then process the old messages one at a time (make sure I’ve replied, archive, or delete). In a mailing list folder, I simply delete them all (;d). Public list archives exist so I don’t have to waste processor power or disk space on stuff I will never ever read.
So far, so good. We’ll see how well it lasts.