My bold experiment in e-mail signal processing

“Turn up the signal; wipe out the noise.”  -Peter Gabriel

Too many of my projects are laughing at me.  Here's how I'm trying to shut them up.

The analogy is signal processing. With only a few important projects and sources of information (signal sources) it's straightforward to handle them all.  But bring in dozens, or possibly hundreds, of other signal sources, and some filtering is needed to avoid going completely insane.

Some of the signal can be blocked with a filter, or it can be separated into components with another filter.  But filtering the signal changes it, and some of the information is lost.  Maybe some of the important information.  No filter that lets anything through is perfect.

So on to my e-mail signal processing.  I was taming my e-mail beast by setting up rules for shuttling the incoming messages into different folders: affiliate newsletters, bloggers, Carnival of Debt Reduction submissions, blog comments, other newsletters, MyPoints mailings for free gift cards, traffic exchange e-mails, notifications for my list of money forums, and on and on.  Things went where they we're supposed to go, most of the time.

But a tamed beast is still a beast.

The beastly part of my e-mail stream was that now some important e-mails could be stuck in a place I didn't expect.  For example, Lazy Man and Money was helping me with a friend's site that had hidden ad code injected into it somewhere, and his e-mails got sent to SPAM because they had the word “pharmacy” in the subject line.

In the end, all of my filtering was making me numb to all of the projects I had going on.  I dropped some pretty important e-mails over the past few months, including e-mails from some potential advertisers and other bloggers.

Most of my e-mail stream was coming off as noise.

So how am I trying to tackle the problem?  I shut off almost all of my e-mail filtering rules, and I'm going to do my darnedest to keep them off. Just about every piece of mail now comes directly to my inbox. This forces me to deal with each message instead of pretending to deal with it by shipping it into storage.

I'm treating almost all of my e-mail as signal now. I'm already seeing that this is helping me to identify the noise.  At that point, I make a decision. Since filtering the e-mail isn't really an option anymore, do I tolerate the noise, or do I destroy the source of the noise?

My membership to traffic exchanges has been a big source of noise.  These sites send tons of e-mail and force you to pay attention to them or else you'll lose what you've earned.  (Safelists are even worse.)  I used them initially in 2004 to promote this site, but the site has long outgrown the need for these, and some of this site's advertisers won't let me use them to promote the site anyway.  At the same time, I was reluctant to get rid of them, as I had substantial downlines in a few of them, and had put quite a substantial bit of time into surfing on them to build up credits so others could view my sites.

Well, I finally cancelled membership in the first one tonight, and it didn't hurt nearly as much as I had thought it would.  I had to confirm three times that I really, really, no joking wanted to delete my account and give up all of the free promotion and blah blah blah.  Now the other ones will be easy to cancel.  I know that I won't miss those e-mails one bit.

What I'm hoping is that my pain threshold for e-mail noise will go down and I'll get rid of more and more low-payoff projects just to stop the e-mails from being crowded out.  Then it will be a pleasure to grab those projects that are laughing at me by the throat and send them off screaming.

The noise reduction will be such a relief.  This will let me pay more attention to things that have importance.  Life is too short to waste it on unimportant stuff that pretends to be urgent.