I Discovered Something Stupid I've Been Doing. Do You Do It Too?

Yesterday morning I thought I'd catch up on emails. But for some reason, instead of going to my inbox, I decided I would see what was in the STARRED section.

Oh man, there were literally thousands of emails I had put there and never done anything with. Some had red stars, which I figured meant I once thought they were important. Some had other colors, and I had also made liberal use of the question mark icon. There were also quite a few, like notices of books being held for me at the public library, that I had in fact done something with but had never bothered to get rid of.

I started with the most recent emails, but immediately I could see that I wouldn't get far before lunch. So what the heck, I decided to live bravely and go back in history. I hit the little arrows and got back about 500 emails out of those thousands. Well, that seemed far enough back, so I went to the bottom of 500 and began looking at titles. There were answers to my 2018 holiday letters, emails where someone tried to sell me something by telling me to hurry up, free trials, and so on. Yikes.

Now Here's the Not So Stupid Part

I found that if I stayed at the bottom of my gmail screen and glanced at the titles, I could delete most of the stars. Once in a while, I had to open one to see what it was, but even then, I mostly just kept them, without the stars.

I probably could have deleted a lot of them, but that would have taken me a lot more time, to open the emails. I sure didn't want to delete any of the darling photos of relatives.

So I just deleted the stars. I thought I would finish yesterday, but grocery shopping took priority. But I only have a few hundred left! And I think I will stop using stars.

But if I do, will I just leave stuff in my email list until I do it? Maybe.