Confessions of an Email Hoarder

Wow. It's so obvious now, but why it has taken me so long to reach this conclusion is a mystery. I've already confessed my natural tendency toward hoarding so it's not all that surprising actually, but I really thought that I had licked it pretty good. No one would walk into my domicile and accuse me of hoarding. I do a pretty good job of getting rid of stuff so it doesn't overtake the few bits of space that we need for wrestling matches.

But today, I was called out by a complete stranger for email hoarding.

When Yahoo switched to unlimited data storage it was the best and worst thing that could have happened to me. On the one hand, it's awesome that you don't have to delete large documents, photos, etc. to make sure that your emails don't get bounced. Remember those days? Someone would send a few pictures and you'd be done for. Don't even try to go away for a week without clearing the Inbox...you'd might as well have fallen off the face of the earth to anyone trying to reach you.

On the other hand, I completely gave up the discipline of deleting emails. Other than the obvious ones that I don't even open--special offers I'm not interested in, lists I joined and haven't bothered to unjoin and other random junk that I don't have time to read, I pretty much just left everything in my Inbox.

I kept thinking that I would go back and organize them--you know, save important things in well labeled folders and delete the ones I now realize I didn't need to save. The trouble is that every day this task becomes more and more daunting, because the number of emails to sift through grows and grows and grows.

This has been on my invisible to-do list for years (you know the one you have running in the back of your mind that if you ever get a big chunk of time to do something you should probably work on?). Do you want to know how many emails I've been hoarding? I'm not sure I can tell you. It's kind of like divulging your weight, only most people can't really guess just by looking at me.

17,000

Apparently that's a big number. The guy at the Apple Store flat out called me an email hoarder. To my face. That's when I realized that I do have a problem.

At first I fished for excuses..."I know, I really need to go through them because there might be something important in there."

"Don't you think you could safely delete everything prior to say, 2005?" he politely asks.

"There's no way I have emails from before 2005..." I stammer.

"Let's check," he innocently suggests.

Yeah, my problem goes back all the way to 2001. Do the math--that's 10 YEARS of email hoarding gone unchecked. Seriously. This is embarrassing.

"Maybe I just need to delete them all and start fresh," I say hopefully.

"That's a great idea," he affirms.

"But what if I die? Wouldn't someone want to comb my emails for all of the wonderful things I've written and had written to me?," I'm grasping.

"If you die, I'm sure the first thing your family will do is read through 10 years of junk mail that you never deleted," he says, not unkindly.

"But some of them contain addresses, you know for those Christmas cards that I haven't sent in 5 years," I defend gallantly. Then I realize that in 10 years, that person has probably moved 3 times.

I want you to know that I came home and deleted them all. I didn't even look them over first. There was probably something very important in there that I will be screwed without. My life may end without a trace of evidence that people loved me enough to send me email. But my invisible to-do list just got shorter. I'm feeling a little lighter now.

I'm sorry if you ask me for information that I no longer have. I really don't think there was any other way. I am committed now to clean out my Inbox daily so that this never happens again. Feel free to ask me how it's going. I'm sure I can use the accountability. (A 10 year old habit may be hard to change.)

The truth hurts, but the truth can also set you free. On to my real to-do list now...