25-year-old Queens, NY resident Ky Hannaford clearly loves to deal in extremes, as she only ever has zero emails in her inbox or upwards of 12,000.
“I got a new email account, and in the first few weeks, it was pretty easy to keep that shit on zero unread,” Ky told reporters with her feet up on her desk. “Spam? Delete it. Important? Read it. I had that shit down pat.”
Awesome! That sounds sustainable, right?
Wrong. Things took a turn for the worse when Ky started to receive emails to which she was not yet ready to respond.
“I would read an email, mark it unread, and make a mental note to come back to it later,” she continued. “Fast forward a few months, and now I have 12,000 unread emails and no hope of getting back where I started.”
According to sources close to Ky, when the email ball starts rolling down the hill, so to speak, there is simply no stopping it.
“Once I hit about 50 emails on an account, it’s already over for me,” she continued. “What’s done is done. Might as well make a new one.”
Sources confirm many people have tried to get in touch with Ky via the account only to receive a response six weeks later blaming the slow reply time on the fact that “my inbox is a mess and I don’t know how to get it back!”
Please, someone help her get it back!
As a correction, scientists say that Ky’s inbox classification has actually been updated from “mess” to “hazard.”
The only exception to this “12,000 unread emails” inbox rule, however, is Ky’s work email.
“Ah, this is the thing,” she told reporters in a hushed tone. “I have to keep my work email organized, so it’s the type of account where I have zero unreads. But my personal account…” Ky trailed off and her eyes became very distant. “My personal account is long gone. And it has been since 2019.”
According to new research from the UPenn School of Communication, Ky is not alone in this plight. In fact, researchers have yet to identify someone with a mid-range number of unread emails.
“It’s pretty much less than ten or over 12,000 across the board,” said lead researcher Sophie Bustos. “The results of this study have shown that we, as a nation, have a procrastination problem.”
Yeah! Literally of course!
On the bright side, at press time, Ky deleted all her emails from LinkedIn, which brought her inbox down to 5,000.
