How to manage a cluttered inbox

For my first article for Medium productivity vertical Forge, I wrote about how to deal with email overwhelm without getting to inbox zero. Basically, I had such a cluttered inbox with almost 2 million unread emails that I was missing important ones, including an acceptance from an editor. So I asked productivity experts to help me and now my inbox is something I look forward to rather than dread. Read more at Forge, and as always, if you like it, shares and claps (holding the hands button 1-50 times, with 50 meaning you liked it a lot) are appreciated!

Ridiculous but true: "I'm addicted to Google news alerts"

My latest essay is titled "I'm addicted to Google news alerts" and is in the genre of "I do something weird and a little crazy but I can laugh at myself." It's for The Kernel's Essays issue, which has lots of other wonderful pieces you should check out too, such as H. Alan Scott's "What getting cancer looks like on social media" and Samantha Allen's Thank you, Internet, for giving me a vagina." For more about Allen, watch the documentary Inside Her Sex, the subject of my recent DAME column, "Why do we feel so ashamed about sex?

What's the deal with autoresponders?

What do you think about autoresponders?

I will never have one cause I'm on too many mailing lists, and now that I have my iPhone and an assistant my email checking is a bit easier, though I'm sometimes slow to respond.

But last week I sent 2 business-related emails and got autoresponders, much more than just a line or two. One was many, many paragraphs and honestly offended me with its presumptuousness. I won't get into all the details because I'm sure they have their reasons, but I can say as someone on the receiving end, I felt like I was being scolded and all I had done was send a professional query. And I should say that the person with the shorter autoresponse got back to me in a very timely manner with an attentive, thoughtful response that impressed me.

My first reaction was to think, "Oh, maybe an autoresponder is the sign of a successful blog." The "I'm too busy doing Important Things to respond to your petty little email" type of thing. But then I realized that it's just not me. I'm not even sure what I'd say, but I'm not gonna worry about it. I get being busy. I have a love/hate relationship with email. Sometimes I'm refreshing my many inboxes and hoping someone interesting writes to me, and sometimes I can't be bothered to compose 2 sentences to my closest friends.

So I'll turn it over to. Yay or nay on autoresponders?

Also, if you don't hear back from me after 3 days (not counting this week when, iPhone notwithstanding, I am gonna be enjoying Austin and having sex and eating cupcakes and such), you can email me again, preferably at rachelravenous at gmail.com for fastest response. The amount of unread email in my main inbox is...scary. Seriously; when I went to the Apple Store to buy my phone I think I scared the woman helping me with my inbox.