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maximumpc.com JUL 2011
MAXIMUMPC
Drawbacks
The Inbox Zero philosophy may
not be everyone’s cup of tea. For
starters, if you don’t receive large
amounts of email on a regular
basis, there’s little productivity
to be gained in clearing out your
inbox on a regular basis, as your
volume of mail is already man-
ageable. If this is the case, we will
gladly trade places with you.
Some detractors argue that
taking pause to wipe out the con-
tents of your inbox on a regular
basis is a waste of time, with far
too many productive minutes lost
to the sorting of emails for the
sake of categorization. Others,
especially those who manage
multiple projects or have a num-
ber of clients they work for, fi nd
that deleting or archiving their
messages can cause more harm
than good when it comes time to
track assignments or create an
invoice at the end of the month.
Laziness and time are also fac-
tors to consider here. No matter
how many folders or rules you
create to manage your chroni-
cally bulging inbox, if you don’t
have enough drive or hours in the
day to enact your organizational
scheme, your efforts (or lack
thereof) will turn into one big bag
of organizational failure.
In the end, the best inbox man-
agement system—Inbox Zero or
otherwise—is the one that works
for you.
8) Birthday Bitch: London bank employee Lucy Gao was turning 21. A keystone moment
in anyone's life, but for Lucy, it was also a reason to demand, in email, that every guest at
her birthday celebration treat her like the royalty she wasn't. "I will be accepting cards
and small gifts between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m.," was but one of Lucy's many diva-like pro-
nouncements. Soon, several billion people were privy to all of them.
7) Out Damn Spot! Secretary Jenny Amner accidentally spilled ketchup on her boss's
pants while they lunched together at a local eatery. The next day, Jenny got an email sug-
gesting she cover cleaning costs. She agreed,
again via email, but only after citing the very
real fact that her mother had died that same
day, then chiding the exec for being such an
uncaring tightwad, then telling everybody
about it. Jenny's boss resigned soon there-
after.
6) Mmm… Spam: Irish Green Party member
Eamon Ryan got serious in 2008, success-
fully pushing important antispamming leg-
islation through that country's parliament.
So how did the Greens commemorate such
an accomplishment? By inviting, via email, in
spamlike fashion, regional technology blog-
gers to participate in a "viral video" contest.
Sure, we've heard of far worse spam, just not
worse-timed spam.
5) Cruel Fool: April 1, 2011: The University
of California, San Diego, alerted all 47,000
people who'd applied to the institution that
they'd been granted admission—a massive
miscalculation of approximately 30,000 po-
tential students. Needless to say, it took days
to undo the damage.
4) Poetic Injustice: Britain's Joseph Dobbie
met what he felt was the woman of his dreams and soon thereafter adorned her inbox
with a highly sensitive and very lengthy expression of his feelings. But Dobbie's would-be
princess declined, laughingly forwarding his prose to her sisters, who then reforwarded
it to the world. Apparently unfazed, Dobbie has since insisted he's received more over-
tures than mockery.
3) All Wet: When your country is in the grips of a killer fl ood, you gotta have a little sym-
pathy, right? Wrong, at least in the case of a certain unnamed employee of Australia's
Queensland Health. Seems the insensitive boob emailed a mass memo demanding that
absentee staff furnish photo proof they were indeed fl ood victims.
2) Careless Whispers: Adultery, spanking, force-feeding, tickle torture. An episode of
Criminal Minds? Well, maybe, but in this instance we're talking about staid old Cornell
University. Two Cornell employees, John and Lisa, somehow misdirected their pseudo-
BDSM perv-ersation to the entire campus.
1) Wang Chung: Peter Chung, fi lthy-rich investment banker by day, nonstop stud machine
at night. At least that's what Chung led his compatriots to believe in what surely must be
considered one of the most pompous emails ever devised. Begging for an additional army
of condoms was just the start; Chung bragged openly about virtually every facet of his
life. But his bosses weren't nearly so amused. When they somehow received wayward
copies of the grandstanding, Chung was canned.
The cluttered, nested-folder
hierarchy directly contradicts
the principles of Inbox Zero.
The 8 Worst
Email Blunders of All Time
CHUNG
IS KING
OF HIS
DOMAIN
HERE IN
SEOUL.