The point at which you say somethin’s gotta’ go and stop notifications from lower-priority stuff?
Does “0” count? I don’t have any email notifications on at all. I check my inbox whenever I want… once or twice a day if I feel like it, or less if I don’t. They don’t get to intrude into my notifications on the phone or computer.
Once every few weeks, I’ll just go “select all” and archive all the messages I haven’t dealt with yet. I figure if they haven’t reached back out after being ignored for a while, it wasn’t really that important to them. Anything actually important gets a text or phone call anyway.
What sort of “notifications” is the OP talking about? Marketing emails about the latest sales or emails from venues about upcoming events or ??? Or something else, like notifications from your CC company about your transactions?
You can set your email program to notify you whenever a new one comes in (possibly a sound, or a little box that pops up on the side of your screen). I think that’s what the OP is referring to. But of course, a lot of us keep it turned off all of the time.
No, I didn’t mean active you’ve-got-mail alerts; just large piles of stuff in one’s inbox.
ETA: Never mind; OP has just answered my question
Now-obsolete post FTR
Actually I think the OP is referring to email subscriptions where outfits mass-blast emails to their subscribers. And after you’ve signed up for 20 of those you find your email box is waay too full of stuff that’s only occasionally of value.
I believe the OP is using the term “notification” in a generic sense, not in the narrow technical terminology sense of a pop-up reminder from the email app on a PC or phone.
(also now obsolete post given follow-up above)
Oh. Then there’s no cutoff. If I get an email that’s important, I deal with it. If I get an email that’s unimportant, I ignore it. Both remain true no matter how many or few emails I’ve gotten that day.
Of course, if I’m doing something sufficiently important, I don’t check emails while I’m doing that, so anything that’s important will wait until I get to an appropriate stopping point.
Lumpy I think you need to change something. For example suppose you receive a number of email discussion lists. Set up a filter to send these to a separate folder. Then you browse this folder like you do Straight Dope where it’s no big deal if you miss a thread–and it’s not a problem if it is several days between checking. Or if you get a lot of emails from businesses you buy from not only can you set up filters you can go to the websites of these businesses and select communications you don’t want. And you can set up filters to delete certain types of messages completely–for example I delete the posts with a “For sale/Forsale” keyword in the title from one of my lists.
[Looks at the 11,006 unread emails in his Outlook inbox]
… cutoff?
To cite just one example there’s Bret Devereaux’s acoup.blog, which has fascinating essays about history and great discussions about each week’s article, which I often find things to comment about. But my gawd, 280 replies in a week– verbose replies– I could spend hours every day keeping current with that one blog. And I suffer from fatigue issues where I have to ration not only my physical but my mental energy as well. It’s the “you can’t read every book in the library” conundrum that forums like Reddit present us with.
Actually rarely hit that nowadays. Though that’s only because Slack has taken over almost completely.
My Slack limit is fairly variable. If it’s a thread I started, or took an interest in early on, its fairly large. If it’s a thread I’m tagged in, and it’s 100s of messages long by the time I see it, and the relevance based on the last couple of messages is low. Then it’s very low.
Yeah, there are a lot of emails I never even need to open to decide to ignore them. Lots of spam (mostly from textbook companies, also from one of our office staff who apparently subscribes to every known education newsletter and forwards them all), lots of things that, from the subject line, clearly don’t apply to me (“Teachers of freshman homerooms”, etc.), and a lot of “SLO” messages (“Subject Line Only”) for things brief enough for the entire message to fit in the subject line.
As a direct answer to the OP’s clarified question, I don’t have an emails per day limit.
But I have a relevance limit. I’m curious about everything. If I subscribe to an email newsletter about X, but after a few days of them arriving I find I’m skipping past them, I unsubscribe. My actual behavior has demonstrated to me that my interest in them is less than the effort they represent. So I act on what I’m telling myself: under my personal priority scheme this one is a waste of my very precious time and attention.
That keeps me down to very few advertising email subscriptions and only of low frequency, and just a few informational subscriptions also of low frequency. I do not need a daily update on the state of geophysical academic research. Monthly is fine if it’s offered, but if the options are daily or never, never wins every time.
Abandoning the scarcity mentality and the “read the whole internet to the past page” mentality is hard. But you must do it to retain sanity in the modern era. A thousand lifetimes of fresh reading material is generated every single day. And 5000 lifetimes of fresh video. Per day.
You’re not gonna successfully bail that ocean with your teaspoon and only a deluded idiot would try.
Gmail is really good about filtering messages. All Spam gets caught and put into the Spam folder by default. I also have a filter for marketing list emails. Everything else just comes to my main Inbox, which I check multiples times per day. Unread means there’s new mail, I don’t leave anything unread. It either gets read or deleted.
Do any of you (who use Gmail) use the “priority inboxes” feature at all? Like it can automatically try to guess which ones are important, which are promotions, etc., and then sort them into tabs & sections: Tips to optimize your Gmail inbox - Google Workspace Learning Center
I tried it once when that feature first came out like a decade or two ago, but found it more confusing than helpful. Has it gotten any better?
I get so many fewer emails nowadays than I did before I retired, so it has not been a problem. Judicious use of my spam filter and unsubscribing has reduced crap to almost nothing. I have enough real activities where people send me mail that a lot of what I get is important.
I must confess that I am that person who sends out more email than he gets. When I was involved in a conference I’d use Constant Contact to send mail to a list of thousands. I send mail to a list of 50 in my writing club. I do try to limit the mail I send, but I also am good about sending meeting reminders because people lose mail five days old.
There might be something to the idea that anything you wouldn’t want to have to write out by hand on paper isn’t worth writing down (although of course this very thread contradicts that).
I like the fact that here below the last post Discourse is advertising a thread “I just hit 14,000 unread emails in my GMail in box” dating from 2017. 9 years later his unread total must be ginourmous.
Separate idea for the OP:
I eat a lot of meals in restaurants. During my career it was about 50% of my monthly total. It’s a higher percentage now. I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but it is a fact.
Anyhow years ago I came to an epiphany: the kitchen decides how much goes on my plate. I decide how much comes off the plate. Those two things are only loosely connected. I owe the plated food exactly nothing.
As applied to email…
The mere fact something arrived in your inbasket means you owe it exactly zero attention. Read, pitch, auto-filter, or whatever as you will. And actively avoid self-spamming (IOW suicide by email) by not signing up for notifications, mailing lists, etc.