- to clear clutter
- to realize I don’t need to keep everything
- clutter affects me emotionally-even clutter I can’t see
- to maintain organization once a system is in place
Now that the storage room is no more (Hopefully I’ll get a completed picture up for you soon) I’ve moved on to the task that has been emotionally affecting me the most: my e-mail.
Like most couponers I have a personal e-mail account and a junk e-mail account. I also have an account for the website. Are you at all curious how many e-mails I have? I currently have
9043 e-mails in these 3 accounts combined. I thought the number was substantially higher but I had forgotten I cleaned out a large chunk of e-mails from my junk account a couple of months ago.
Photo credit: alvimann from morguefile.com
I’ve learned how to navigate my e-mail pretty well. I can search, sort, file and filter -those aren’t the issue. My biggest problem is that I subscribe to many wonderful sites and because that e-mail is sitting in my inbox I feel that it’s my responsibility to read it. It pains me to delete an e-mail that I requested if I haven’t read it. It somehow makes me feel irresponsible.
Through my class with Creative Order and Design I’ve learned that it’s ok to let go of subscription e-mails that are 6 months old -even if I think that special grilling or dessert edition might come in handy! I’ve learned to not feel guilty. I’ve learned how I should manage my e-mail accounts and am ready to make the commitment to keep up with the organized inbox. Will you make that commitment with me? If so, please keep reading my personal plan below and think about how you can tweak it to your own needs.
I’ve come up with a series of solutions for my again overflowing inboxes (all 3 of them). I’m going to take this in baby steps. This weekend I:
- added up the damage (9043 e-mails)
- set my goal (delete more than half the e-mails in 4 weeks, leaving about 4500)
- developed a plan of attack
I’ll set a timer for 5 minutes a day to work on my e-mail. If I don’t work one day, I’ll double the time the next day. In just 35 minutes this week my goals are to:
- Choose 5 sites that I should unsubscribe to– and do it! I know 2 will be recipe sites and one will be a home organization site I recently mentioned on FB that I had deleted a large # of e-mails from.
- Sort my inbox in yahoo by sender or do a search in gmail to find and group 5 other subscriptions and delete all e-mails that are older than 1 month.
Now that wasn’t so bad was it? Sounds manageable to me, now I’ve just got to make myself do it! If you’d like to join me on this challenge you can enter your first name and the # of e-mails in your inboxes (the combined total). We’ll update them each week and encourage each other over the next month.
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If you’re wondering how I did after 1 week on the challenge, see my post from 8/2 here.
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I have the subscription issue too, where I subscribe to a few sites but sometimes only have time to read just a few of the issues they put out. I’ve learned just to let them go, and be happy for the ones I can read.
Good luck on your e-mail de-clutter challenge! Once you get a system going I think you’ll feel some stress melt away, and it will stay away with a system in place. Remember – start small, celebrate your “small wins” as you are working toward your larger goal, and just keep working at it! : )