Tidy-in-Place Challenge APRIL 7: Email

A cluttered email box causes overwhelm and saps productivity. Be very choosy about what you let in your digital “home”.

• Clarify what’s important to you NOW, in THIS very unique season of your life. Jot down a quick list of key themes or values. Recent events have given many of us MUCH greater clarity about what’s important and what kind of information we want to receive. Unsubscribe from any emails that don’t fit into the key themes you’ve identified.

• Challenge yourself to unsubscribe to a certain amount of email subscriptions today. Things that seemed important to you just 3 weeks ago may not seem important now.  Remember every unwanted email that comes into your inbox is just a distraction from the important ones.

• Forget FOMO! If you end up unsubscribing to something you end up wanting again in the future, you can always re-subscribe.

BONUS:  THE “WORKAROUND” FOR ORGANIZING YOUR 5000+ EMAIL INBOX

For people with a gigantic inbox, the thought of processing (reading, deleting, filing) all the emails in their inbox might just be too overwhelming. So if you don’t have a lot of time and you have in excess of 5,000 emails in your inbox, here’s a workaround to deal with the volume:

• Create a separate archive folder, sort your email by date, and move everything older than 30 days into that folder.

• Don’t worry, these emails will still be accessible by a search, they just won’t be cluttering up your inbox. People often leave emails as reminders in their inbox indefinitely because they think they are going to forget to do something.

• Regretfully, those “reminders” are usually lost in the swirling sea of a jam-packed inbox and end up being useless. But you can be sure if something’s been sitting in your inbox for 30+ days and it’s “important”, you likely would’ve received or will receive another reminder in the form of a follow-up email, call or other form of contact.

P.S. If you are an Aloha Organizers newsletter subscriber and you don’t find our emails helpful, PLEASE unsubscribe! I promise we won’t have hurt feelers! 🙂