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A lot of people have an overwhelming amount of unread email in their inbox. This is so common, that I readily expect people to react with some combination of jealousy and dread when I mention that my own inbox is ideal at 0-5 items, acceptable at 5-15, and excessive when there’s more than that. You don’t need to run as tight an inbox ship as me, but those feelings of dread and disorganization might be something you want to fix. Here are a couple easy ways to get started:

Archive everything older than two months, right now

1. Go to Gmail right now (if you don’t use Gmail, I recommend making the switch).
2. Click on the search bar at the top, and type before: 2013/8/11 (or whatever two months ago today is).
3. Then click the check box just underneath the search bar to Select All.
4. It will tell you something like “All 20 conversations on this page are selected. Select all conversations that match this search“; click on that underlined text.
5. Then click the Archive button, which is the one that looks like a file drawer with a down arrow on it (alternatively, if you have keyboard shortcuts enabled, just hit the ‘e’ key.

There! You have many fewer emails in your inbox now.

Activate the “Send & Archive” button and use it

This is the greatest thing ever. I use it all the time, and it’s a major factor in keeping my inbox clean.

1. Go to your Gmail settings (it’s the gear icon in the upper right)
2. A little way down is a section where you can ‘Show “Send & Archive” button in reply‘. Click that then scroll to the bottom and ‘Save Changes’!
3. Now whenever you’re replying to an email, click “Send & Archive” instead of just “Send” (which will still be there), and your inbox will stay more clean!

Pick up some new inbox habits

What is your inbox for? Everyone has a different answer to this, but for me, it’s about correspondence and it’s a to-do list. Some would argue that it shouldn’t be the latter, but it is for me. What your inbox is not for is to store information that you might want to look at later. The search function we just used in the previous example can find anything you’ve archived, so I recommend using that for information retrieval instead of keeping things in the inbox.

Archive nearly everything

What does that mean for keeping your inbox clean? What I do is I archive nearly everything that comes into my inbox. The only exception is if it’s something I need to take action on. If I can take that action quickly, I’ll do it right then and then archive the email. If it’s something I get to later, I archive it as soon as it’s done. Archiving is the best.

Unsubscribe from lists

Also, a big source of inbox clutter is mailing lists that you don’t actually read. Most of these you can stop easily by looking in that email for an Unsubscribe link. They’re usually in small text at the bottom of the email, but sometimes they’re at the top.

Hope these are helpful!

So, I’d never really sat down and deconstructed this quote from Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first name day party. I just did. The parentheses are there to break it up and make it easier to parse:

“I don’t know (half of) you half as well as I should like”

You say this to someone when you’d like to know them better. He’s saying half the assembled crowd he would like to know better. I think this is a compliment.

“I like (less than half of) you half as well as you deserve”

This is a little trickier, but means that Bilbo acknowledges that there are some people there he doesn’t give enough credit. However, the “less than half” implies that it’s a small number of people. So what he’s really saying here is that there are some who deserve more credit than he gives them, but most people he doesn’t like truly aren’t very good people. It’s an insult hidden inside a compliment, wrapped in a confusing construction.

My extraordinarily thoughtful and intelligent friend Jeff Kaufman occasionally writes about contra dance issues on his blog. I have a slight disagreement with his most recent post (though I agree with most of his assumptions) so I decided to post my response here as well as in his comments.

Jeff’s post

Given that:

• In contra dance anyone can dance either role.
• The current role names suggest men should dance one role and women should dance the other.
• To many dancers the traditionally male and female roles have a substantial lead/follow dynamic, while to others there is no or minimal role-based lead/follow.

I see:

• Calling the roles “lady” and “gent” doesn’t work for some dancers, and continues a pattern of men telling women what to do.
• Calling the roles “lead” and follow” doesn’t work for other dancers, and pushes contra toward becoming a full lead/follow dance.
• The terms “port” and “starboard” have emerged as a clear favorite over many discussions.

So:

• I’ve made up a set of my dance cards to use port/starboard (pdf).
• When I’m booked to call dances I’ll ask if it’s ok for me to call this style.

Alex’s reply

I think another important criterion for role names in contra is whether they’re quickly understandable by the dancers. My perspective is that Gent/Lady is problematic for the reasons you articulate, Lead/Follow is problematic for the reasons you articulate (also, at the Free Raisins dance at Hampshire College last week, we saw that “Lead” sounds too much like “Lady”), and nothing else has wide enough acceptance to be useable. I understand critiques of this perspective that it’s too complacent to a problematic system, but I would argue that trying to instigate a new vocabulary is as futile as trying to force a change in natural language.

The solution I prefer is to acknowledge that the current options are problematic for these reasons, and use one of them consistently and conscientiously. I prefer Gent/Lady, because it’s what I learned with, and I think it’s okay because I distinguish the role names from the gender identities they mean traditionally.

What I cannot tolerate is Man/Woman for role names, because that is so indistinguishable from colloquial names for gender roles that when those role names are used, it feels like the dance roles have to be the same as perceived gender roles. THAT is not okay.

I think Gent/Lady mostly avoids this problem because people don’t really use those words to refer to gender roles in our contemporary context. Their use for that purpose is archaic, so it’s easier to assign them primarily to the dance role definition.