anyone have good tips for checking your email

[mactheo]

every time I check my email i have to spend like an hour screwing up my courage. it's the scariest thing in the world to me. does anyone here just check email with ease, fire off an email no problem? I need some tips

[mactheo]

I've tried:
- drinking 3 cups of coffee before
- drinking zero cups of coffee and just doing it before I have time to think
- not checking it at all

[mactheo]

or if you also have trouble emailing, feel free to post here

[Science]

What kind of emails are you getting? Are people like, yelling at you via email?

[mactheo]

What kind of emails are you getting? Are people like, yelling at you via email?

it's for my school. right now they're softly yelling at me, but only because I haven't been responding to my emails

[mactheo]

[hasel]

It’s helpful to remember that the second email is always easier to check than the first

[Marza]

[Science]

Oh, ya you gotta just delete that email address then.

[Science]

Isn't there something in GDPR about no yelling?

[Marza]

unsubscribe from EVERYTHING you can

if there's too much to deal with, use the snooze feature to defer a few emails until there's a manageable amount left, then just quickly write replies and archive them once you're done.

[virile]

have you considered having no friends or family or responsibilities

[virile]

also consider if you check your email you may wind up with important news like the michelle obama podcast is here from spotify

[gug]

Ive basically stopped writing emails like they are well composed formal letters, more like they are texts, and I find it very existentially freeing. As short as possible and no "dear, best," bullshit. If people want to dock style points or whatever they can fuck right off.

[shark week]

i have so many goddamn work email inboxes so my strategy is to work on one, get all caught up, and then fall woefully behind on others and get scared to check them

rinse, repeat, every fucking week

[deebster]

I have extreme email anxiety, too. I think it was the many years I spent in graduate school.

[quinine]

every time I check my email i have to spend like an hour screwing up my courage. it's the scariest thing in the world to me. does anyone here just check email with ease, fire off an email no problem? I need some tips

i've struggled majorly with this. At one point I realized Gmail's auto sorting thingy was not working for me and just essentially abandoned my account for months. finally resolved to get off Gmail which was a goodmove but it took hours and hours to sort through all the junk in my account for anything I might want to save or respond to

thing im struggling with lately is ending up on mailing lists for various causes that I support, but I just don't have the bandwidth to keep up with everything yet still feel guilty about unsubscribing from something that I may be able to contribute to down the line. Tried using a separate address for that kind of stuff but it quickly fell apart, because I would still use my primary address for actual correspondence related to organizing and it inevitably would end up on the mail list too so I'd be getting duplicates of everything

recently I signed up for this new email service called HEY which very much aligns w my mental model of how email should work. It has a section you can just dump emails into that you know you need to deal with at some point, if not necessarily now, and it pulls all those mailing list things out of your inbox entirely on a reading page. only been using it for a month so I can't wholeheartedly endorse it yet, but thus far it's been really transformative in reducing the "looking at my inbox anxiety"

[bigcat]

bury it in the back yard

[bigcat]

for real though i think of them as tennis balls coming at me, just try to hit as many as you can back right away and then remember to check the back court for the rest every so often

[bigcat]

also everybody should have multiple tiers of decoy emails for marketing, buying things, newsletters, etc.

[mactheo]

have you considered having no friends or family or responsibilities

yeah I tried this for a few months, it works okay

[mactheo]

thanks for the replies. maybe I should try HEY. my only idea at this point is to convince the faculty that i’m an unstable genius who can’t deal with emails, but i need to show my genius before I can do that

[clouds]

this is my 24/7 anxiety nightmare

I should have taken my dad's lead and been a plumber or something.

[mactheo]

i am thinking i’ll probably end up doing something that requires no email, unless I can figure out a way to deal with this (not just the email, but interacting, meeting, etc)

[clouds]

I take 1 no email week of vacation a year and tell everyone well in advance and still when I check it it's full of

"urgent clouds i cannot get ahold of you"
"Please call me ASAP"
"Nevermind I figured it out"
"What day do you get back???"

even though I set an out of office alert and voicemail. work culture is SICK. in the bad way.

[mactheo]

or, I could get all the faculty at my school to board here

edit: that sounds awful clouds

[mactheo]

sending an email with “ASAP” is a surefire way to get me to panic and ignore it

[warmjets]

sometimes i have to pop on to my work's gmail account briefly to do something in drive and i purposely squint in a way that it blurs my vision when it takes me to my inbox after sign in

[mactheo]

sometimes i have to pop on to my work's gmail account briefly to do something in drive and i purposely squint in a way that it blurs my vision when it takes me to my inbox after sign in

omg lol I do this exact same thing

[virile]

have you considered having no friends or family or responsibilities

yeah I tried this for a few months, it works okay

oh yeah that's a good effort you'll get em next time slugger