Advice Which Occasionally Comes Back To Bite Me
I sometimes talk to small business owners who tell me that they are planning to get a computer inventory system “someday.” Usually I tell them to regularly take a look at all their inventory in one place, physically. It’s easy to look at a spreadsheet or database and not realize how much is actually there.
Well, today I got to tell myself that when I went through some old emails. It was the emails from a content subscriber platform. I had thousands of emails going back five and a half years, to January 2018. I didn’t realize it had been that long, or that I had that many emails from this platform.
(There will be a part 2 to this, where I talk about “Content Is King and Email is God.”)
The Good, The Bad, And The Embarrassing
Right now, I’m still bemused by the old memories. On this platform, I mainly subscribed to and supported podcasts. There were some visual artists and writers, but mostly it was podcasts.
I had the same feeling as when looking through old photographs. Some now-defunct podcasts were like old friends who had drifted away. Life had gotten busy for them and they didn’t have time to record. And I missed those. There were a few where the podcast had multiple hosts and it was pretty clear at the end that those hosts would not be working together again. Those still had some good memories, but I also knew those were moments in time which can’t be recovered. And there were a few that were like looking at a part of my life I’ve grown beyond. Damn, I really used to listen to that? I spent time and money on that?? Really?
There’s a joke about there’s two types of people when it comes to email. One type has only a handful of emails in their inbox. The other type has thousands. I am definitely a “thousands” type. I’m trying to get better at getting the old emails sorted out and either deleted or put into a subfolder. I’m working through one of David Allen’s Getting Things Done workbooks. That’s what lit a fire under me to start cleaning out old emails.
And Here’s Where It Bit Me
And just like I’ve told other people, computers fooled me into not realizing how much stuff I had squirreled away.
Footnote
* When a musical group breaks up, there’s ownership and rights to to band names, recordings, and residuals. What it’s like for podcasts with multiple creators?