Habit #8

Daily Email Purge

***First off, an apology to falling behind by nearly a week on the 2 week habit cycle. More intention needs to be paid to this area of my life, so I will make up for it by introducing a short and sweet habit/description, followed by shorter one week implementation period before getting back on track with Habit #9***

The Why

The reasoning for this habit can relate to almost any adult who participates in any form of social interaction. It seems that everyone, from retail stores to restaurants to special interest groups, is vying for that coveted email address of yours that they can add to their mailing list and subsequently flood your inbox with a bevy of information, offers, and updates that you just can’t afford to miss. For me, it turned into about a dozen or more emails a day that I would have no intention of ever reading. The main problem was that I would soon allow those daily emails to compound on each other until I had over 1,200 emails in my Gmail account. And to think all of these are completely separate from my work emails! Not only does having an excess of emails feel overwhelming, but it also caused me to overlook actual important emails that I would very much like to respond to. So recently, I decided to put my foot down on this nasty habit rooted in apathy.

The How

The first thing I did was go into my emails and unsubscribe from every list that I wasn’t finding value in. Even ones that were once very useful to me were given the ax (an easy way to do this is to type “unsubscribe” into your email search bar and just go down through each result). That was the easy part. The second, which is still a work in progress, is to remove additional emails each day. This can either be placing the important ones in appropriate folders or just scrapping the clutter. So far I have reduced my inbox total to around 500 and my goal is to have it at zero by this time next week. Once this is achieved, it will be much easier to just go through each email I receive for the day and deal accordingly.