I'm really so very sorry about this email.

How does my email find you?

Maybe somewhere between ordering some snore-repelling earplugs and a cool nudge about your tax return from the ATO. Or is that just me?

On Mamamia Out Loud on Wednesday we talked about email inboxes and look, for something as unsexy as admin, we got quite the mountain of feedback:

The Wednesday cast represented a spectrum of email personality types: Amelia, millennial achiever that she is, has long been a devotee of Inbox Zero - the ambition to close out every day - if not every hour - with no Unreads.

For the past decade or so, it has been the gold standard of the productivity police. A professional person who’s trigger-fast on the email response has long been considered exceptionally Good At Their Job.

I am a Gen X slacker when it comes to email. With the exception of the efficient delivery of good writing and information worth knowing (case in point, this email, on this excellent platform, cough), email has become, to me, the least urgent form of communication. Want a response? Text me, DM me, Slack me. I might get to your email at some point, but my life was changed by a former boss who told me “I don’t pay you to sit and answer emails all day”, shifting that responsibility to something extra-curricular and therefore, not particularly time sensitive.

Em, a Gen Z to her bones, is has inbox overwhelm. Her red number is somewhere in the tens of thousands and staying that way. Behold:

Amelia’s commitment to inbox zero was challenged by this article in Walrus - The Case Against Answering Every Email - but also, her ability to maintain it relies on a level of comfort with discomfort that I could never.

You know that moment in a shop when the person behind the counter says, “Can I just get your email address?” Well, Amelia just says a polite, “No.”

Imagine that. The boundaries. Bow down.

Anyway. Outlouders, as usual, have all the best ideas. If you’re not in the podcast’s Facebook group, here’s the kind of helpful gold that goes on in there…

Like this smart woman:

And if you’re in parent-admin hell..

Welcome, Amelia’s people:

But then, here’s someone who wants you know the problem with “sending to spam”…

And also, if you can’t handle the nanoseconds of awkwardness that this retail worker knows she’s putting you through:

So this might be the answer:

May you be at peace with your email bodycount, friends.

On Fridays, we recommend:

Mia: Silent fidgets from the toy shop. A perk of spending time with a three-year-old (her granddaughter, Luna) is the IRL shopping access to a whole new range of fidgets that Mia uses during records to keep her focussed. Problem is, they all make noise. Watch Friday’s video on Apple or YouTube to see what Mia scored on her last visit.

Em: The new season of Colin From Accounts, also the last. Like Em, I was nervous about Colin losing its edge since the entire world is now in love with the Australian comedy but Season Three bears no sign of a Hollywood water-down. Picking up three years after the cringe-inducing Season Two finale when Gordon proposed to Ash at her best friend’s wedding, it’s still sharp as hell and laugh-out-loud funny. Harriet Dyer and Patrick Bramhall deserve every last drip of the love they get for creating this bloody gem. On Binge, dropping weekly.

Me: I’ve been listening to Say Nothing, a 2018 non-fiction book by legendary investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe (currently bothering all the bestseller charts with London Falling). This is not a recco for everyone, it’s no feel-good distraction, but it does what great story-telling journalism can - takes a story you thought you knew and pushes you look at it in entirely fresh ways. It’s about The Troubles in Northern Ireland and begins with the 1972 moment when a group of people knock on the door of a Belfast flat and tell the 10 kids inside that their mother will be right back, they’re just taking her for a short walk. Jean McConville was never seen alive again.