Hah. Most boring blog post title evah. Yeeeahhhh, I’m back, baby.

Anyway, if you use Gmail A LOT, like I do, and you make filters every so now and then, maybe you’re a 4 hour work week type guy maybe you just need to manage your workflow. There are good ways to manage Gmail filters but what I want to talk about is maintaining Gmail filters.

I’ve had a gmail account for years and years and it acts as my primary contact point. The other day I was looking at my filters to see if I was inadvertantly filtering out a message I was expecting but didn’t receive, when I discovered that I had probably 50 filters currently running and a lot of them were no longer desirable, harmful even. Sending stuff to old business partners, sending Amazon emails to my wife (I guess that’s why she’s so hard to surprise), deleting a ton of things without reading them (I must have been in a  bad mood for a month or so). Anyway, it’s the old Law of Unintended Consequences — Unintended consequences will overwhelm the intended ones.  Basically, the stuff I had set up to automate and streamline my workflow, had long passed their point of usefulness and now was running out of control, hindering or possibly harming me.

It’s very easy to clean out your Gmail filters, just click on the Settings link in the upper right and then filters is one of the links across the top of the main pane.