Almost back to Inbox Zero

I don't remember when I started hearing about it but I started earnestly trying to keep my GMail Inbox tidy starting 2016, when I started working full time at Enthought. I vaguely remember spending a full weekend going through my Inbox and archiving or deleting all emails.

I remember running into a lot of nostalgia as I was going through emails from when I was in college, which is when I started using GMail seriously. Mails about coursework, mails with photos and videos my and friends of mine took when we went out to eat.

I let myself go over the last few months and emails started piling up in my Inbox. Mainly because I periodically go through a cycle of subscribing to more newsletters and email groups than I can possibly keep up with and then culling them to reduce clutter in my Inbox.

After many months, I finally spent this weekend cleaning up my Inbox - reading through a lot of finshots (https://finshots.in/), labelling and archiving financial information, deleting promotional emails and so on.

I'm now finally down to 29 emails in my Inbox with 19 unread emails - most of which are related to financial education. I need to spend time over the coming months reading up and understanding some of the financial jargon that I have come across in the past few months. I think it is very important for me to understand the various concepts involved in basic investing - so that I can both make good investments and I can help those around me in making financial decisions.

Now that I am down to less than 1 page of emails (1 page in GMail is 50 emails), I want to keep it that way in the near future. Let's see how long I'll be able to keep it up this time.

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more