Politics of Late Summer - They're on Vacation

Late summer is upon us, mid-July to end of August.  Folks are on vacation from work, spending time with the kids, getting away from the kids and grandparents, or just laying back away from the workplace.

I've always enjoyed late summer.  The daylight hours are shortening as we're in our long trek to the Winter Solstice, the sun is setting a bit earlier and life begins to quiet down a bit.  Late summer is a fine time.

Being from the old 'internet school' and relying on email more than I do social networks, I notice one big change come late summer.  Even political folks take breaks from work.  It's most noticeable to me by the reduction of political and fund raising emails.

No one wants to filter through their 'INBOX', typically sorted by received date/time, and pick out emails to read.  That's why one of the things that I try to take advantage of with my email is the ability to apply rules to filter emails and move them to appropriate folders prior to me ever seeing them. 

All my emails from family members are automatically routed to a 'Family' email folder.  I always look at the Family folder first when I log on. Other emails get filtered/routed to their appropriate folders.  My high level folders are shown in this image:

Once I set up email folders and appropriate filters/rules, I can quickly assess which folders should have my priority attention and which can be set aside until time permits.  In the image above, the 'Politics' folder has only 3 unread emails this morning.  It actually has 6 emails with 3 of them already read and 3 newer ones that are unread.

During non-vacation periods, the 'Politics' folder would be crammed with emails from folks that are taking advantage of my political preferences to get me to contribute money to one of their causes, to contact my Congressional representatives about a specific issue or to read this special ad from one of their sponsors.

Most folks tend to get this type email if they've ever responded to almost anything and left an email address.  We all know what they are and typically ignore them unless the email references a high priority issue for us.

Where's this Monday Morning crapola leading, just this; it's late summer and political crapola email folks are also taking a break while resting up for the Congress is back from vacation, schools' back in session and vacation's over push for money.  I figure I've got about another 2 weeks before things begin to heat up again with the Political Crapola emails.

So there ya go, a short assessment of my late summer observations on email messages.

JD, laying back a bit and eating a breakfast muffin here in the Big Town of Savage.

PS - The 'FW' folder is for any email that's not already filtered out that has a forward designator in the subject line of the email.  The 'Folks' folder is for acquaintances and has quite a few sub-folders.  The Guys folder is for 'guys' that typically email joke type or video type emails.  The 'Shopping Stuff' folder is just what you think it would be; emails from stores, internet vendors, etc.  The 'INFO' folder has many, many sub-folders to hold important informational items from folks I do business with or financial folks.  The 'Dewey' folder is used to hold a copy of emails that I send out that have me on the 'To' line and everyone else on the 'BCC' line.  I typically purge this kind of stuff and only keep emails from the last couple of weeks.