Clear the Digital Clutter Challenge Part 3

Week 3 of the challenge is here.  By now I hope that you’ve

• totaled up the # of e-mails in all your inboxes
• set a goal for how few you want to have left at the end of this challenge
• unsubscribed to several e-mail subscriptions you weren’t reading and had no real desire to read
• deleted e-mails older than a month from several other e-mail subscriptions
• set up filters for these e-mail subscriptions

In doing these 5 things I hope that you’re starting to see your inbox become less of a burden for you.  I’ve certainly enjoyed being able to see e-mails from personal friends because much of the other e-mail is being filtered out to folders.  I was able to quickly go into my Paid to Read e-mail folder and do those e-mails quickly without having to search for them.  I also started tackling my junk e-mail account.   I’m down from 9043 the first week to 8320 the 2nd week, and to 6551 the 3rd week.  My overall goal is to make it down to 4500 so I’ve got to make more progress this week.  With the steps I’ve taken the past couple of weeks with filters I know I can do it!

We’re halfway through this challenge so now we’ve got to ramp it up a bit: Personal E-mail.
I know this is a biggie, but together we can do it!  I sorted my yahoo mail folder by sender and sent all e-mails from my best friend to a separate folder.  There were only 367- that’s not bad right???  (except that we haven’t known each other quite a year yet and I’ve already pared down these e-mails several times)  Regardless my next step this week is to move e-mails from several friends and family members that I e-mail frequently to their own folders and start working my way through those e-mails.  You may be the kind of person that can just delete them all and not feel any remorse.  Me- I like to make sure that there aren’t any addresses or phone numbers in there, or perhaps other info that I don’t want to lose.  I’ll go back to the oldest e-mails in each of the 5 folders and start deleting.  I have about 1000 e-mails in these folders combined so I’m hoping to cut 500 out this week- gotta work quickly  


I’d love to hear how you’re doing with the challenge. If you weren’t able to start the challenge with us, no worries- just start at the beginning of the challenge and take 5 weeks on your own schedule.  I think you’ll feel a weight lifted off your shoulders by doing so!