The story of how a young wizard named Charlotte tamed her Inbox

It started a couple of years ago, when my smarty pants CS major little brother originally tipped liberal-arts-major-me off to the existence of Boomerang. It was great to be able to send emails to certain people “early in the morning” so it looked like I was a responsible early riser when in fact I might be sinfully sleeping in… (or of course, for purely strategic reasons, as I learned later).  While that was nice, it wasn’t until I worked through the Revive Your Inbox Program that I truly understood the magic of Baydin.

I was a rather untidy individual much of my pre-adult life. My dorm room was one of those classic college dens where you could barely walk around because I treated the floor as the biggest shelf in the room  (sorry roomies).  I eventually cleaned my act up when I realized that life was better without the mess.

My email life, on the other hand, remained in an unfortunate state: I treated my inbox like I used to treat the floor and let it pile up with thousands of trashy unread emails, only a fraction of which were relevant or important, more flooding in by the hour.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a serious case of inbox constipation.

My bad habits left my inbox chronically backlogged, full of undigested bits of information and newsletters, while the occasional important emails were hidden underneath the muck, sometimes never again to see the light of my attention again.

Then, thanks to my brother’s tip to implement Boomerang way back when, the Revive Your Inbox Program miraculously appeared. I thought I was just signing on to learn some neat tricks, but found out that it was not only a juice cleanse for the dysfunctional digestive disaster that was my inbox, but also a bootcamp for my atrophied…well, really non-existent e-management muscles, and a feng shui email energy master, all rolled up into one.

The email gurus of Baydin helped me curb bad habits, shed thousands of unread email pounds… and keep them off.

I’m proud to say that even after my 17th monthiversary of graduating from RYIP:

• My inbox is a happy and healthy 7 emails full (I occasionally reach the noble 0, but it’s an ephemeral joy/reality)

• I masterfully search, sort and schedule my emails without breaking a sweat

• The feng shui email filters I stationed during the program still magically direct email into their rightful places

I felt like I was getting to know email in a way I should have known all this time. It was like Baydin had finally taught me how to properly use a can opener after years of bashing them open on rocks. I  had entered a new era, evolving from a Charlotte to a Char(lotte)izard… going from the weak mouse-clicking Ember to a hot-keying Heatwave, from the non-committal email Growl to the decisively deleting (okay, archiving) Dragon Rage.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I’m a perpetual paragon of email wellness. On particularly busy weeks, or days when I’m on the road and don’t have much access to computers, my inbox will swell up a little bit or a lot. But now I know better than to keep it in that indecent state;  a quick blast or two through the email game (sometimes just mentally) is usually enough to work its metamucil magic, and I’m back to feeling that bliss that comes with a clean inbox and conscience.

I guess I’ll admit it publicly… I kind of fell in love with Baydin when I sensed that they truly cared about what they were doing. Through the way they carefully and clearly designed the program so that the user could succeed, I could tell they sincerely wanted to change the way we interact with email for the better… not just in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of quality of experience while also giving us a taste of conscious tech use.

Thanks Baydin, for vastly improving an area in my life that I never realized would make such a difference in my productivity and well being. Sometimes I wish that you guys offered a Revive Your Inbox Program for life.

ABOUT CHARLOTTE

Charlotte lives in Santa Monica, where she spends her time teaching kids yoga, mastering toasts, sporadically blogging and meditating on life. To tap into her primal side, she sumo wrestles and will be competing in the International World Games in 2013.