Twenty plus emails go to my personal email box each day. Not counting Facebook notifications. I wish they were all juicy long updates from my friends in far away cities but they’re not. They’re a lot of junk emails telling me about things I should buy from websites I have purchased things from or entered a contest at.
Did you know that at the bottom of these emails is a quick unsubscribe button. I have started using it. I’ve also started Unlike-ing or removing my Fan status from shopping websites on Facebook.
You can permanently declutter your inbox. I’m also removing notification emails from Facebook. I check my Facebook account often (something I want to do less of) and can get those must have updates once, right on the site.
Sure, a paired inbox will only save me about ten minutes a day. But that’s every day. Almost an hour a week or just over two whole days of the year.
That’s my time cost but what about money? Every morning I receive an email from babysteals.com. Sure, it’s a great place to buy baby stuff and they have excellent deals but do I need to ruminate every day on if it is something I need or want? If I actually, truly NEED an item I’ll research it and buy it WHEN I NEED it. I’ve done a lot of advance shopping off websites for baby items and it’s been very hit and miss on actually using them.
I’d like to get my inbox down to just personal correspondence from friends and bank statement notifications. My guess is that if I passively wait for newsletters and such to come my way and then hit the unsubscribe button it will take me a month. We shall see.
Found your blog today and am slowly working my way through your blog from the beginning cause we sound so similar in some ways. Started reading this entry and was immediately inspired to do something right away…so I actually stopped reading and went to my gmail and unsubscribed from 3-4 things that had popped up just since I checked it this afternoon!! Only then did I come back to finish reading and to comment!!
Just popped over from Miss Minimalist and working my way through your archives. This is such a good thing to do (unsubscribe) – I started it about two months ago on my yahoo email and it’s been such a relief to only see one or two messages in the Inbox instead of one from every shop I’ve used in the last year!
Such an easy thing to do but with big simplifying/minimalising results.
Karen (Scotland)
I know! It is so nice to not be bombarded with BUY BUY BUY every time I check my email. If I end up needing to buy something and think there could be a coupon I just Google it.