Okay, maybe 37 is too many 😬

As of writing this email, I have 22 different email accounts, and I think that might be enough, but I haven’t finished cleaning them up yet, so don’t quote me on that 🤭

One of the “conveniences” of digital life is that we have much less physical stuff to deal with.

Hundreds of books that don’t fit in your overpriced rental apartment? Put them on a Kindle or other e-reading device.

VHS tapes dating back to the Reagan administration that haven’t been used in decades? Streaming services should have everything you need.

Stacks and stacks of paper records that you don’t ever look at but need to keep in case one day in the future something pops up and you need evidence of your medical appointment from 2004 to justify a claim against your insurance that is trying to screw you out of your third left hip replacement? Scan and digitize them so they live forever and are more easily searchable.

That CD tower with hundreds of CDs I collected throughout my teenage years that my Dad has been trying to throw away since I went to college? Don’t fret, internet friend. I convinced him not to throw those away 💿

Now, why would I do such a thing?

Decades ago, humans had a couple of outfits to wear and a handful of belongings they could carry around in a knapsack tied to a stick that was long enough and sturdy enough to hold everything.

(SIDE NOTE: Where does one find such a stick? Do the train-traveling homeless have a guide on where all the best sticks are? With the combination of industrialization & deforestation, can you even find a stick of that girth and strength to carry with you on the road anymore? If you have answers to these questions, send them to my super secret email I just thought of creating while writing this paragraph [email protected]).

Today, we don’t need sticks like that. Enough storage warehouses are popping up on every corner of every major city to store all the shit we’ll never need for centuries to come when other people haggle over it on the latest Discovery Channel reality TV series while the owner is rotting away in some cemetery that is also overcrowded.

Lucky for us, digital solves all these problems!

No longer are we burdened by the weight of our physical knickknacks like college diplomas earned through $96,541 of student loan debt or grandma’s LifeAlert necklace that ran out of battery in 2017 🪦

No, all of our shit is now stored in the digital wasteland that is the cloud and the internet (“cloud” and “internet” are used interchangeably in this essay, but if you’re a techy and upset that I didn’t differentiate between the two, please send your complaints to [email protected]).

There’s no need to worry about anything. It’s all digital! Nothing exists! It’s all glitter and smoke and sparkles in the air ✨

I don’t want to scare you, but think about how many website accounts you no longer use and don’t even remember exist are out there right now with your full name, date of birth, your home address….

As I said, our digital lives are a wasteland 🫗

Passwords on passwords on passwords you’ll never remember and probably never use.

Accounts you signed up for to order one thing and then act like that site never existed.

College addresses and old work inboxes with (hundreds of) thousands of unread emails that don’t matter because you’ll never get access to them again, and what’s a little 401k if the next Great Depression won’t spare the other 92% of Us anyway?

Maybe if you..nope, never mind we’ve gone too far to even begin to think about cleaning them up.

…or have we?

That’s why I’m here today. To tell you the most important thing you could ever do to help organize your digital life.

I know it might sound counterintuitive, “David, you’re telling us we have too much digital shit we’ll never remember, but you want us to make even MORE emails on top of that digital shit? This doesn’t make sense.”

Life rarely does, loyal reader. It rarely does. And the way I reach my conclusions might only work in the digital wasteland that is my brain, but I’ll attempt to explain my reasoning to you.

I’m going to ask you to do really scary: What’s the total number of unread emails you have? (Please comment at the bottom of this post or respond to this email or text me with that number, I’m trying to see something.)

As of writing this paragraph on this email, I have 35 unread emails across my 22 email addresses. You might think I’m lying, but I’m not. I can’t live with a full inbox. That’s one of the craziest things anyone could ever do. I don’t know how people actually see a five-digit number on their email inbox and continue to live life. Some of you reading this might have that right now and justify it by saying it’s too far gone and you’re never looking at it. You just moved on. You don’t let it phase you.

But it does.

(Also, I’d like to say thank you for opening mine despite your life being in complete shambles; it means a lot 🫶🏽)

Deep down inside that red notifications number with countless electronic correspondences you’ll never read is like a tiny rock in your shoe you can’t find and remove no matter how long you look, except that this rock is metaphorical and it’s actually a giant hole eating away at your soul 🫠

There’s software that claims it can sort your email and actually block emails you consider spam when you mark them as such (something my beloved Mac Mail App refuses to do).

I’m not doubting this software’s capability. I’m sure it’s able to do exactly what it claims.

But it’s not the solution we need.

More programs, more tech, more software, and more digital aren’t going to solve our issues when we already have so much e-shit piled up they could make a hundred-episode season of Hoarders by going through old Google Drives.

What I’m saying is that there’s too much digital shit to think we can handle it all in one place. What we need is a bunch of different places that we are controlling that handle all of our different shits.

Stay with me here.

If I had a single email for everything I do, that would mean every brand, business, platform, shop, institution, government organization, and random Nigerian/Indian scammer with my email address would know it belongs to David Núñez-Ariza who lives at—na I’m not going to give you that information so easily (jokes on me, full voter registration records are public in the state of Florida 🥴).

But what if I told you there’s a way to give yourself more anonymity by simply going through the not-that-much-trouble of creating different email addresses for different things?

ONE EMAIL FOR SHOPPING

Make this a random thing. Something like [email protected]. When you sign up, don’t use your real name. Use a random name you’ll easily remember and instantly recognize when you see something addressed to you (like a package or a letter).

This way, you get all the newsletters you never want to read until they have a great Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale.

TWO EMAILS FOR BANKING STUFF

I was going to say one email, but if that email is compromised, all your banking stuff is compromised. Have your banking spread across two emails just in case something happens to one you have access to the other.

One of the emails could also be for medical and government-related things. Having your personal info here with the proper names is okay because you need to have it.

I don’t trust the banks because they’re banks, but I understand I must give JP Morgan Chase my proper info. What I don’t have to do is provide that info to AliExpress when I order 200 wooden bookmarks from China to draw on and give to my friends.

This is what I’m trying to tell you.

THREE EMAILS FOR SOCIAL

I have about five emails for social because I have different accounts and backup accounts for my main user and then accounts and backup accounts for the brand and other random ideas I’ve had throughout the years. If an idea doesn’t work, but you still created an email, get rid of everything from the original idea and use it for some random shit!

It’s okay if cupcakesbysamATgmailDOTcom is only used for fantasy football platforms and sports newsletters. If you are focused enough on a single topic, you can have a separate email so it doesn’t mix in with other things.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

FOUR EMAILS FOR—

The 12 Days of Christmas rhyme scheme ends here. I have nowhere else to go. But I think you get the picture.

Now, this doesn’t work if you only access your email through the Gmail website on a web browser. I might be in the minority for this one, but I think using a web browser to look at your emails is the worst possible experience for checking your emails.

I hate it.

I hate it when you’re at a job and everyone uses their browser to check their email, which means everyone communicates through G-Chat and you have to have shitty G-Chat open in a browser, and you have to remember which tab it is of the 48 tabs you have open but can’t read because there are too many tabs but you have to find it because one of the departments you communicate with refuses to use Slack while the other department uses Facebook Workplace and the third department just texts you on WhatsApp 😫

No, I don’t want to use the G-Chat app either—that app sucks. Everything you want to do can be done in Slack (and better).

For all these emails to work, you need to have a desktop email client to click through your emails. That’s one of my secrets for keeping my email inbox at 0. I simply go to my Mac Mail App, where I have my 24 emails (two more have been created since this email started; please keep up), I go to each email inbox, and I quickly tap through all the unread emails, marking them as read. Sometimes, I do it more slowly depending on the inbox because I might want to read more than the headlines before deciding whether I’m actually reading the email. Sometimes, I go really fast and just tap away, reading the subject line and preview because I know nothing in that email is relevant to me (I’m only waiting for the good discounts).

Regardless of whether I treat the stuff in that email as more or less important, I can get through it pretty quickly.

Why am I so focused on emails?

Because it’s the only thing we’ll always have (unless Google shuts down, which sounds improbable, but anything can happen).

You thought you’d always have your Twitter DMs and Bookmarks, but with the way Elon is always huffing and puffing, you never know when he might pull the plug on everything.

You might always have your Facebook friends, but you’re also beholden to to the whims of Uncle Zuck and the Meta team (they might start charging you one day just to access your friends list lololol).

But emails? You’ll always have them.

That’s why I switched to Beehiiv as my email platform instead of Substack (which is focused on being more of a social site as it continues to grow).

Whatever happens at the end of the day, I’ll always have my email list and your names on it. If I ever need to get in contact with people, I can find them there and reach out directly. That means I have 1,546 contacts I can always send things to via electronic mail, no matter what platform I’m using.

(ANOTHER THING: That 1,546 number is not true; there are only 353 subscribers at the moment. I need you to help me pump those numbers up.)

So, please, go out and create more emails.

Make stupid names.

Use alter egos.

Separate your shit into different inboxes from different addresses, so you always have a backup of a backup and a different email to use in case you want to search the spicy sites (yes, you definitely have a separate email for the spicy sites).

Just remember, the one thing you have to do with every single email you ever create ever is subscribe to 2UESDAY so I can get my numbers up 📈

If you’re a Premium Subscriber, you might be asking yourself why there hasn’t been a short story sent this month. I’m working on it. I just didn’t finalize the details how I wanted to in time for November’s story. This means you’re getting two short stories in December 🤗

Thank you to everyone who subscribes, and especially the premium subscribers who think using their hard-earned-money to help me type more random shit is worth it 🥰

If you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a Premium Subscription by following the link below. It would go a long way towards letting me spend more time each week writing stuff like this just for you (yes, you). I also changed the annual subscription to actually make sense because my original idea didn’t work.

Let me know what you think.