Although I would say I am a good communicator in general, I am not the best digital communicator. Not in the sense that I cannot communicate well digitally, but in the sense that to some people, I do not communicate digitally. In the past, I rarely had a strong habit of answering digital messages and most times, they would pile up. If I am doing well, I am responding to most of them, but there are always some who are unread since weeks or longer. And the emotional burden of those unanswered messages (and the feeling of potential people that I have let down) is growing over time and making me more uncomfortable.

Digital communication is hard, messy and most people struggle with this, so I am aware that it is just a difficult subject. In my case, I think I suffer most from context collapse, and it makes me mentally tired to switch those contexts all the time. That might be the reason I avoid taking care of my digital communication.

I also just dont like how spread across many apps and programs this is. In my case, I have the following digital communication channels:

• Multiple Mail Addresses
• Whatsapp
• Telegram
• Signal
• Mattermost
• SMS
• Second Hand Marketplace
• Official mailbox by the state

And this does not account for physical mail or verbal communication while meeting people. It is no wonder that I am overwhelmed trying to manage all these channels of information.

The long term goal is to develop a healthy habit of dealing with digital communication, so I never run into this feeling of communication debt again. But before I start with a good daily / weekly habit, I want to get out of these numerous unread messages and start from a clean slate. I have set myself the following simple goal:

Obviously this will only be a temporary fix and not a permanent one, but to me it feels like this is a precondition to start a good digital communication habit.

Day 0: Getting an Overview

Lets get an overview of the situation. On the 20.01.2026, this is the communication debt I have built up:

# Mailboxes
Personal Mailbox Main: 746 Mails
Personal Mailbox Secondary: 49 Mails
Personal Mailbox Main Old: 382 Mails
Personal Mailbox Trash Old: 95 Mails

Work Mailbox Main: 0 Mails
Work Mailbox Secondary: 0 Mails

# Messengers
Whatsapp: 26 Chats
Signal: 15 Chats
Telegram: 18 Chats (Big Groups and Channels excluded)
Mattermost: 15 Channels

# Other
SMS: 574 SMS
Second Hand Marketplace: 0 Chats
Official Mailbox by the State: 16 Messages

Total: 1936

Well, that is a lot! But while going through e.g. my mailboxes and the SMS, the vast majority of these unread mails are things like booking confirmations, notifications, security codes, etc. I expect that over 90% of those messages will be completely unimportant. The difficulty is to go through the long lists and be concentrated enough to still find the few messages that matter. To add to the complexity, in messengers I counted the unread chats, not the unread messages. That means that some might have multiple messages waiting for me. And, as is the nature of messengers, not all of them are short messages, but some also might involve long voice memos and deep topics that require a lot of time and emotional empathy.

I also realized that I am good at digital communication, when I have to. E.g. at work or when buying something second hand, I am ontop of my messages. This is also true for urgent things and many contacts on my messengers. There are just a few (or many) unlucky ones, where my brain has decided to avoid andwering them. This is nothing personal against this person, it is just a pattern in my brain. My apologies go out to all the people who are still waiting for a reply. It is coming soon!

Another thing I realized is that I need to think about how I will do this project. Many messages of them will want to be answered, but also many of them might come with their own todos and tasks. As for this challenge, I will answer all messages, and do all todos, as long as they are less than 15 minutes.

Day 1: 30 minutes

I began the first session with answering urgent messages, that affect my plans today or soon. I remember another tricky part about this communication is the struggle over the calendar dates. Some messages might include plans for trips or people visiting, and many times it is a struggle to manage this rare resource of our time. For the first session, I have just spent 30 minutes and I managed to answer the following messages:

Signal: 5 Chats
Telegram: 7 Chats

Day 2: 150 Minutes

I did not manage to progress on this project yesterday, as some unplanned things happened and it took some time. But I am trying not to get too much out of my balance through this, as such is life. Now I am back on it. Today I worked through old mail accounts, some of which where filled up only with spam or some old account security notices. An old twitter account of mine had a very weak passwork and there were many login attempts that failed at a second security layer that required an E-Mail code. I managed to still login into the account and deactivate it.

I also stumbled upon very old mails of an old friend of mine, whom I have not responded in a very long time. I took some longer time and wrote a message. This is the hardest for me… Messages from old friends bring back the pain from a relationship that used to be vibrant and close, and is now just a shadow of that. Opening up to these relationships and feeling these old feelings always makes me sad. But life just is like this unfortunately, some connections will slowly fade.

But I did good progress and two mail boxes are completely read and clean:

Later that day, I had more energy and pushed further. I went through many mails of my main mailbox and started reading, cleaning, responding, marking as read, etc. Also here were many newsletters and unimportant mails that just needed little effort. I noticed that my mailbox is at 91% storage capacity. I really dislike this about the digital life, when storage runs low and there is no good process for this. But I might have found a solution for the email storage: I recently stumbled upon the open source project OpenArchiver, which is a selfhosted archiving software for mails. This way the mailboxes are freed again, but older mails are still preserved and searchable, if I need to go back to them. As I already use PaperlessNgx, which is an archiving software for PDFs, I did a quick search if mail archiving is also already implemented. And voilá: It is possible! So a new project idea is born: 📦 Setup e-mail archiving. I will be adding this to my maybe someday project list.

Getting back to the topic, I actually had quite some satisfaction finally cleaning up my mails and made relatively good progress. Finally at the end of the day, I read the following amount of messages on the day:

Personal Mailbox Main: 549 Mails # -> 267 still missing
Personal Mailbox Trash Old: 95 Mails
Personal Mailbox Main Old: 382 Mails
Whatsapp: 1 Chat

But so much for this time :) I am happy with the progress.

Day 3: 70 Minutes

On the third day of working on this project, I continued with mail in my main inbox. The low-hanging fruit have already mostly been collected last time, so today it was more effort per mail. During this session, I unsubscribed from 6 newsletters, did a survey about my masters degree and answered to a Github issue. I noted down three todos that came out from going through these mails.

In total, I read:

Personal Mailbox Main: 163 Mails # -> 104 still missing

Day 4: 80 Minutes

Today started well. I went on through my mails and got the inbox folder of my main inbox down to zero. There are still some other subfolders missing, but in general it went well. Health insurance letters (nothing important), work agency (nothing there, I checked it in the past) and other unimportant mails. Then I went on to the first of the remaining unread subfolders, which is with 30 or so mails from different agencies from another country, when I was living abroad. They regularly send different letters and I did not expect anything urgent. Turns out there was some tax payment outstanding since over half a year and they have tried to reach me for months. In the meantime the payment had a crazy high interest rate as penalty for late payment. A ~300€ tax payment became 1100€ in half a year. This obviously instantly killed the mood and made me feel ashamed. I know I have a pattern of avoiding sometimes, and this is a painful mirror to this pattern. Well, I payed the money and that should hopefully be done now. Another true swallow the frog moment for me. I hope this will be a lesson for me 🐸.

Later I did some more an brought the total unread mails count down to two (which are connected to a task). So that is already quite a success! Also, I went trough all unread SMS (all basically unimportant) and marked them as read. So today I managed:

Personal Mailbox Main: 102 Mails # -> 2 still missing
SMS: 574 SMS

Day 5: 90 Minutes

Another day, anoter set of messages. I finished all mail debt and got it basically to zero. Since then, it has been significantly easiert to tackle new mail, as I see they are actually just 7 new mails (instead of 312 unread in the inbox folder alone) and most of them are not important. So there is already a great improvement there.

But this leaves me with answering probably the most difficult messages of them all: Chats with friends and people I like. I am still figuring out why this can be so difficult for me. Part of the reason is that through digital ways, I want and can connect to more friends that are dear to me than my heart can handle. But I also cant find the heart to end these connections alltogether.

I managed to write a couple short and longer messages, record one longer voice message and read multiple chats that did not need a reply anymore. In total I managed:

Signal: 12 Chats
Whatsapp: 19 Chats  
Telegram: 18 Chats

Day 6: 90 Minutes

I started day six knowing, not much is left. Mails are all read, most messenger chats were read, the last missing thing, a couple chats in messengers that I have always avoided responding. Today can be the day! So I took the time to listen to a couple long voice memos, read some heartfelt messages from old friends, hear some updates that were already outdated again… And I sent my responses to all of them.

So I did this last push, checked all plattforms and replied to the couple things that bounced back at me and then, I did it! At exactly 11:59 on the 30th of January 2026 and after (just?) a bit more than 10 hours, I was completely free of any digital messages 🎉🎉🎉 Not a single person was waiting for a reply and I was free of all communication debt!

I should note however, this state did not last long, as less than five minutes later, the first messages startet popping in again. But that is fine :) I do not know if I ever had, since having digital devices, no unread messages anywhere. I am not sure if I will have this ever again. But I know that it feels very nice to get rid of these shackels and to start from a clean slate again.

Summary

I am quite proud. Although many messages were not from humans or just unimportant, I managed to go through more than the 1936 messages and do what my brain avoided to do since years. I already feel the difference with my mail, it is so much easier to respond, because I feel like I am ontop of things again. Very happy with this project. In the middle, the motivation left me a bit (after all low hanging fruit have been collected), but I am happy I pulled through. Part of it also thanks for this little blog ;)

Of course this is a band aid to a deeper problem. Reading once all messages will not change my struggle with digital communication. But starting fresh and without debt makes it significantly easier to build a better habit in the future. I am thinking about creating a follow-up project that is about developing a better communication habit, but I am not sure yet.

While going through and answering some messages from good friends who live far away, I also figured parts of it out why I find it so hard to respond. I am thinking about writing a little poem or text about it. But that is for the future.

But now I am done with this project and it needs to be celebrated! 🎉