E-mail Bankruptcy

This is a silly new "Web 2.0" term, I believe, but I've seen it in a few places now. If I understand it, it refers to the act of deleting everything in your inbox in one shot and not looking back regardless of repercussions. If you're like I was two days ago, it's a tempting proposition.

However, I'm actually good at repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, so I decided to clean up my inbox manually. One e-mail from you kind folks at a time. Some I had saved for a picture or an address or some other piece of information which I moved to the appropriate repository ("My Pictures" or an address book). Most of the rest were generated by the Yahoo Groups I belong to or comments on my blog(s) and Flickr page. The rest was junk I glossed over and never deleted.

I'm down to 66 items in my inbox and I think I can get it even cleaner. It took me two concentrated evenings to do it - thank goodness there's nothing on tv in the summer.

My current task at work is very similar. I'm converting pictures in a very large manual into line drawings so that they import/export more efficiently. Most people would hate my job.

In fact, when I interviewed for the job, they asked me why I would want to be doing this for a living. I'm not sure, but I do know that I have time to write this post this morning because there's no immediate deadline looming. Also, I'm listening to SomaFM and thinking of the set lists for both bands for this evening. I'll make some serious progress on these image conversions today, for sure, and then I'll go home feeling like I accomplished something today. Then it's time to rock.

Not a bad way to live.