Why I'm glad I'm a digital pack rat
Our manager sent out a reminder of some training today. Some new requirements coming soon.
Yeah, super dull workplace stuff.
One of my colleagues, though, was grateful for the reminder, because he had “round-filed” the original email mentioning the training.
I don't delete work emails.
That struck me as so foreign. I hardly delete any email, ever. Even the silly automatic notifications from wherever.
Why delete them? Electrons are cheap, and storage is cheap.
I'll occasionally delete obvious spam, but that's about it.
There's little downside to keeping everything I send or receive.
Same thing with my home emails.
I rarely delete any of those, either. I've lost some of them in computer crashes, but not on purpose.
I have an archive folder that goes back to 2009.
The folders with my emails take up about 36 GB. I can get a dozen 32-GB thumb drives for $20. My email storage is nothing.
Sure, there's a lot of crap in there.
But there's also some gems.
At least one product in there, waiting.
A few years ago, when I was getting a lot of email inquiries about pricing serial numbers, I started offering email analysis for people's currency for a small price.
I charged $4. People would send me their serial number and some other information about the bill. I'd write a few paragraphs talking about the number, link to a few eBay auctions that I could find that were a decent match for price, and send it off.
It's occurred to me that I could dig up these emails — because I still have them! — and assemble them into a swipe file after taking out email addresses and other personal information.
I could bundle this with my ebook Fancy Serial Numbers for Fun and Profit, or sell it separately.
And they're right there in my files.
Everything's material.
It's a bad idea to sell trade or state secrets, of course, but most anything can be adapted to a product.
I have some serial number pricing emails.
You might have photographs that could make a nice bundle somewhere on your computer.
Or class notes, or short stories.
Heck, someone packaged recordings of farts as NFTs, and sold them!
What do you have already that you can sell?
Thanks for reading!
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Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
