Clutter can come in both physical and digital forms (thanks to overflowing email inboxes!) It can be overwhelming and challenging to sift through all the special offers, newsletters, and junk mail to discover the few messages that actually deserve your time. To help remedy this problem, I've made my email inbox my top weekend organizing priority and hope to purge the digital clutter monster.
If you are interested in putting the digital clutter monster in his place, it is important to understand the nature of the beast. Email correspondences typically have one of two purposes: to SELL you something or TELL you something.
Merchants spend big bucks trying to convince consumers they will somehow benefit by owning their product. If you frequently purchase items from a particular merchant and genuinely enjoy seeing new items offered and promotions, keep them on your radar by allowing them to continue to send you emails. However, if you subscribed to a merchant's email list to receive a one time coupon, or just forgot to uncheck the "please send me daily emails" box when joining a group or website, you should unsubscribe.
By subscribing to a merchant's email list, you are essentially inviting them into your home and offering them your precious time on a daily basis. You probably wouldn't invite physical strangers into your house to peddle their wares, so why let cyber merchants be any different?
Messages from friends, family members and co-workers usually include bits of information tailored to social or work related meetings, events, projects, and news. Things start to get tricky when friends, family, and co-workers use email as a platform for sending .gifs, chain letters and other nonessential information. All the dancing cats and internet memes add up and before you know it, you've found yourself off task and out of time to get to the messages that actually require your attention and merit responses. Not to say that quotes and videos of skateboarding dogs don't have a place in cyberspace; they are just better suited to Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, and Pinterest. If a friend, family member, or co-worker is a repeat junk mail offender, point them to a social media website and tell them to share those types of items with you there.
Companies and special interest groups love to keep you informed via email of their newest projects and accomplishments along with stories and information related to their fields. This is great if you are genuinely interested and engaged in a majority of their content, but if you find yourself deleting their messages without even opening them, you should probably go ahead and unsubscribe. If you find yourself with a renewed interest in kayaking, or baby sleep tips in the future, you can always subscribe again.
Join me in simplifying your inbox in the new year!
