I can time-travel without a TARDIS
I'm really bad at keeping up with my email. Like, really bad. I have too many email addresses - I actually should try to remember all the email addresses I've had over the years and try to sign back into them and see what I get. Of course, some don't even exist anymore, such as Juno and MSN.com, so that would be fruitless. And others, such as Excite.com, delete my emails if I haven't signed in after a certain period of time.But I digress. I time-traveled today, back to Jan. 1, when I decided to see what all these hundreds of unread emails in one of my inboxes were about.Apparently, HP had a great sale on printer ink for the new year. New Year, New You, I suppose. I also caught up on all my Prompt entries for the year. Edlyn Yuen's terrific Prompt project tried something new for the holidays. Seven questions before Jan. 1 and another seven for the first week of the year. All the responses will be put in the virtual vault and sent to us at the end of this year, to see how things have changed. Or not. A bit of a time capsule.I had missed some of the emails over the past couple of weeks, so I went through them all and wrote my responses. Some were really interesting, such as "3 people you'll reach out to for help" - it made me think about how we ask for help and how we offer it. I feel as if I've asked for help a lot in the past year; I'd like to reciprocate a lot more.I'm not going to go through all my responses, because that would totally negate the idea of the vault, so let's look at what else is in this inbox.Oh! The newsletters I love and subscribe to:
- NextDraft, a summary of the day's news by the managing editor of the Internet, David Pell. I missed reading too many, but I always go back and check them out because there are many timeless items, as well.
- #awesomewomen, a newsletter from Stacey-Marie Ishmael, who's a powerhouse in media and tech and you can learn all about her and her projects from her website.
- The Lightning Notes, a daily and weekly (I subscribe to the weekly version) email of inspiration and wonderful stories from Noter-in-Chief Catie Whelan whose job before this was as a Senior Policy Adviser in Congress. So, you know, no big whoop.
I love my updates from Quora, too, because people ask and answer the most fascinating and, sometimes, surreal questions there. My all-time favorite is this one: "Is it legal to launch a small rocket into space from my house? Do I need to notify anyone?" and the subsequent answer from Robert Frost, an Instructor and Flight Controller at NASA. (Short answer: There may be local ordinances against it, and most rockets would require a waiver from the FAA. Oh, and if you live near an airport, it may be a no-fly zone.)I learn about conferences that are long since past, and remember emails I used to get and long since unsubscribed from.Of course, this is only one of my inboxes. My worst inbox has more than 34,000 unread messages, including the now-read Tumblr metrics report for my "Poor Morrissey" tumblog for June 1-7, 2015. (I had 28 unique visitors that week, if you were curious.) Or back to November 2014 when my friend Angela tagged me on Facebook because she and the hubs were coming to town.Sometimes I wish I hadn't done previous inbox cleanups so I could go back even further.Then I look at the number of unread messages and I'm not so sad my time travel is thus limited.Photo by Rodger Evans via Flickr Creative Commons.