I posted Tuesday about the end of my contract with my largest client. One of the last set of steps I took was to take my email address off many jobs and alerts. The difference has been stunning and well worth it.

My inbox for my main business account is now down to fewer than a dozen emails a day. I apparently missed 4-5 alerts from my client that I’m getting cleared up, but other than that, now it’s emails related to other items.

Not only has this made my email box reading a lot easier and faster, it honestly has given me a lot of relief. For example, for the last few months of 2023 and the first two of 2024, there was an important job that started to randomly fail around 4:00 AM. If I was at work in the ED, I’d be stressed about getting home in time to rerun it (and to try to debug it). Fortunately I finally resolved that about a month ago, but still kept my eye on it.

In addition, there was another major server issue that would randomly occur with one of the VPNs. We hadn’t seen the issue in months, but I had been paranoid about it failing. Sure enough, I found out from a former coworker that it failed Sunday night for the first time since December. And my first thought was “well thank god it’s no longer my problem.” I mean I felt for them that they had to deal with it again, but it wasn’t anything I had to worry about. That was refreshing.

This morning, after a 12 hour shift in the ER, a bunch of us went out to breakfast. It’s the first time I could do that and not worry about having to get home in time for a meeting or needing to check email. Again, it was refreshing and relaxing.

I think I’m enjoying this so far.