I never really mind working a day or two during the holidays. It’s always a slow time - no one is terribly motivated to work very hard, and there are enough people on vacation that there aren’t any pressing deadlines to attend to and new crises are rare. It’s a good time to clear away the cobwebs, get things a little organized and see what’s piled up over the last year. Or maybe years.
Yesterday’s task for me was cleaning out my forbiddingly huge email archives - well over 700MB worth of email I’d saved. Some of it for reference, some to read later, and some…well, who knows? After going through most of it, I can honestly say that I have no idea why it was saved. A good bit was probably accidentally marked as read or mis-filed, but there were a great many things saved that really just should not have been.
What was interesting (in the academic sense, at least) were the number of “cool” or “interesting” links that had come my way in the last four years or so that are simply gone. Not just redesigned, reorganized or outdated, but gone. Companies that were doing great work or had something interesting to say…gone.
Tracking the subject lines and contents of my email archives was like walking through a history of the internet economy over the last four years - from the heyday of the late 90’s (lots of job postings with high salaries and perks galore, news of start-ups and tons of new ideas) through the really difficult times over the last few years (lots of resumes and advice on career-switching, thoughts on doing more with less, and very few job postings) to today. Things seem to have stabilized a bit - the high-flying days are well over, and that’s as it should be, but there are job postings again, with decent to good (though not insanely great) salaries and solid but not extravagant benefits.
While there was a part of me that was tempted to save it all for nostalgia’s sake, the realist in me was cutting ruthlessly and taking mental notes about what not to save going forward. I’ve cut the archive down to under 500MB, which still seems like too much, but - as Samuel Clemens would say - I haven’t the time to make it smaller.