COLUMBUS, OH — Greg Ohlson, 41, completed construction of what he described as a “fully optimized, rules-based email architecture” last Tuesday, sorting all incoming mail into labeled folders with such precision that he has not seen a single message since.

The system, which Ohlson spent two evenings and one full Saturday configuring, routes newsletters to a “Reading” folder he has not opened, work emails to a “Priority” folder that silenced all notifications, personal correspondence to an “Actual Humans” folder he forgot the name of, and everything else to a “Misc” folder currently holding 1,847 unread messages including his daughter’s school’s emergency closure notification from Monday.

“The whole point was to create margins,” Ohlson said. “My inbox was chaos. Now it’s completely peaceful. Almost suspiciously peaceful, actually.”

“Every rule I added felt like wisdom. In hindsight, I was just burying things faster.”

IT support specialist Dana Kimura, 38, who helped Ohlson review the system after he missed a company-wide all-hands meeting routed to “Low Priority — Internal,” said she had seen similar configurations before. “He built a very elegant system for achieving the exact same outcome as ignoring his email entirely,” Kimura said. “Architecturally, it’s impressive.”

Ohlson confirmed he is now “in talks with himself” about whether to dismantle the system or simply add a fifteenth rule to fix the fourteenth rule, which was created to fix the thirteenth.

At press time, Ohlson had begun watching a 47-minute YouTube tutorial on building a better email filter system.