Coworker: "The spam is just awful."
Me: "I know, I am getting hundreds of pieces a day."
Coworker: "That bad! I am just getting a dozen a day."
Me: "I just need to unsubscribe to a number of mailing lists."
Coworker: "But all of that is important! Its company mail."
I disagree, its Spam. Sure, its not Viagra ads, but its mail I don't need to be reading. I've been at MySQL for four years, my role keeps changing, but my subscription list has not.
In a modern corporation people get signed up to new mailing list all the time. Once upon time it mattered that I read everything our connectors group did. Now? I subscribe to announcements and see what the output is. I make a point of pinging people and seeing what is floating up to the top of discussions, but the day to day I just do not need to follow.
Sure, I can put it into a folder and search on it later, which is what I do, but I don't know that this is really worth the disk space.
What made me think about this today? Zawodny commented today in blog on picking what to ignore.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008581.html
Part of the trick for keeping myself on task is that I write out a list in the morning of what I need to do. I work on that list and I try to make a habit of not letting myself get pulled from it (and the list is done in OmniOutliner). The list normally has more items then I can complete in a day (though it has happened), but not enough items that I feel that it is impossible.
And as far as email goes? I look at it three times during the working day. Once in the morning after I have written my list, once after lunch, and then again near the end of the day. I miss a few ad-hoc meetings from time to time but that is rare.