Imagine keeping 50,000 physical letters. Now imagine the 50,000 actual e-mails you have running wild in the wilderness known as your inbox…
Which kind are you? Diligent about your e-mail cleanliness or…
If you need to declutter your home, there are books, websites, articles, video, pinterest pins and so on to help you. However, if you want to declutter your digital files, Google and any techy friends might be your best bet. When I mentioned to Facebook friends that I’d gotten my e-mail inbox down from 8,000 unread e-mails to 200 unread e-mails, people said ‘help me’. So, huzzah!
‘Mark As Read’ People!
I didn’t see the point in marking e-mails as read until I realized I couldn’t just delete everything without worrying about losing something that I might need again in the future. Yahoo e-mail inbox storage is up to 1 Terabyte and GMail has up to 15 Gigabytes, so for GMail, deleting will be important but if you have Yahoo (or purchased more storage space) you can fudge it a bit. Either way, if you’re worried about deleting something important, just mark stuff older than a week or month as read. I mean, if it was really that important you would’ve read it right? The majority of my unread e-mails were from subscriptions, so subscriptions is a great place to start. Marking unread will not help your e-mail inbox storage but it’ll make that little number drop which is good for the brain.
Mass Unsubscribe From Newsletters
Use a service like Swizzle or Unroll.Me to unsubscribe from multiple subscriptions at a time. Going through each e-mail to scroll down and then go through the un-subscription process is time consuming. I used Unroll.Me, but Forbes Magazine suggest’s Swizzle in their article Declutter Your E-Mail In 5 Easy Steps (which I highly recommend checking out as well). I liked Unroll.Me because decluttered multiple e-mail addresses. I have not tried Swizzle. There are probably other services out there, but I’d suggest checking these out first. I still unsubscribe from newsletters individually, using these services doesn’t mean you should break the habit unsubscribing regularly.
Make Digital Organization A Habit
A lot of people don’t even realize digital organization is even a thing, hence why e-mail inboxes can get wildly out of control. Anyone online uses an e-mail (and if you don’t, I’d like to ask you HOW?!), but like keeping your room or house clean… its okay to be a bit messy, but when things start to get dirty… things can turn nasty. If you don’t clean a dirty dish, bacteria and smells come abound. If you don’t clean a dirty inbox, stress and lost information abound. Make a daily habit of 10-20 minutes of cleaning your inbox, or a weekly 30 minutes.
