ROI

 
I was thinking that I ought to clean up my inbox finally.  A good way to get a lot of crap out of my inbox fast would be to just plow through the unread messages.  So I'd have to filter the inbox for just the unreads.  It's not really hard.  I used to do it.  You go into the view menu, and there's a submenu, and you get a dialog box, and you open another dialog box from there, and there's a tab where you can set a filter.  Then you have to remember to do it again later to turn off the filter.  I can remember how to do it if I try.  
 
If I try.  
 
Why would I try?  
 
Why invest in turning on a filter?  Why haul out the mental equipment to do this task?  
 
There's a shortcut if I were gonna do it several times.  You can save the set of View settings as a named view, and then you can switch to that view from a convenient pull-down menu any time.  I used to do that sort of thing.  I had views like MonkeyView01 which was good for reviewing new mail, and another that was good for something else.  I did that kind of shit.  Making a view takes extra clicks.  It's worth it if you're gonna use the view a few times.  I could quantify the cutoff;  decide a good metric is number of clicks and then count, and if you're going to use that view more than three times it's worth it.  There were views I invested in that passed the cutoff, and others that didn't.  Good investments, bad investments.  Of course, just learning that I could make views, and then how to make views is a chunk of investment I haven't counted.  
 
And now I don't do that shit any more.  What's the payoff of cleaning out my inbox?  Really?  Where would a risk/reward calculation land me, if I were to invest in it?  Would I get fired before any investment in a tidy inbox paid off?  Or would a tidy inbox keep me from being fired, somehow?  
 
There was a Wired article, after the big financial meltdown, about the mathematical risk model that the big financial institutions used when deciding what securities were a good investment.  Turns out it was wrong.  
 
So if they pay Ph.D.s to calculate what's worth investing in, and they can't help but fuck up, what hope have I got?  
 
Fuck my inbox.