2024 has just begun and with it all the conversations and thoughts about what will be everyone’s goals for the year. It hasn’t been any different for me (and I really quite like it🤗), so among many year-long items that I listed, I set one goal for January:

Make my personal e-mail inbox manageable

It was not the most aggressive goal, I had around 50 mails on my inbox at the time¹, but I didn’t want to just delete them all, because they’re part of my task management system, therefore it was a challenging target.

Anyone close to me knows that I like to reply to everything that is sent my way - and am very proud of it 💪🏽 - I have a system to do so on WhatsApp (may write about it one day) and another on my e-mail. See, I’m an Inbox by Gmail orphan 🥺 and learned to keep track of everything that I had to do by snoozing e-mails²:

1. Received utility bill during work hours? Snooze until evening to pay later
2. Bought ticket to a concert? Snooze until day before to download tickets
3. Pledged on crowdfunding campaign? Snooze until next month to check for updates
4. Etc …

I am a very organized person and would probably deal with all the tasks above well enough without having to snooze them, though there is one type of task where it really helps me³, but what about the ones I don’t know what to do? Do I delete them, keep in the inbox, snooze to some date? Well, at some point this was the answer:

For sure I don’t hope to live another 900 years 👴🏽, nor do I think Gmail will be alive by then, I just used Inbox’s “Snooze to someday“🎲 function, so that when it appeared, I’d take action, but it never did! It is an interesting lesson in itself, in fact more than one:

• To myself: if I was ok with postponing the task indefinitely, should I even care about it or should I have just wiped it and moved on 🤷🏽‍♀️?
• To Google: What the heck happened? Did the variable on the code overflow and rounded to the maximum date, was it a conversion problem when retiring Inbox, or does it mean that, if Gmail survives until 2999, this is a heads-up about the next millennium bug 👀?

I learned to let go of many tasks as I cleaned my inbox, I just found this mishap funny to write about and will probably be keeping the mail around, maybe someday it will surprise someone with a big decision⁴!