One morning, a few days ago, I opened up my inbox. I noticed something that gave me an uncomfortable feeling. 80% of the new mails on the screen were useless. They were either newsletters I never read or press releases from PR folks I didn’t care. It was an effort for me to dig out the useful mail among the clutter.
Missing out an important client email was the last straw.
I could not take this any more. Decided to take action.
Two days later, I now have an extremely clean inbox. Its such a relief to open the inbox in the morning and only find emails that matter to me. Here’s how I did it:
Unsubscribe from Promotional Mailers: I was amazed how many promotional emails I was getting. I opened up each and every promotional email and hunted for that one word: UNSUBSCRIBE. I was pleasantly surprised that in most cases it took just one click to unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe from Newsletters: Yup, I remember subscribing to these newsletters. But I don’t remember reading them at all. The newsletters kept piling up. Time to get rid of them. Excepting two newsletters I found informative, I unsubscribed from the entire bunch.
Personal emails to PR folks: Because I was a columnist in newspapers once, I was easy target for PR folks to harvest my email and bombard me with press releases of their clients. I counted every major PR firm had me in their list. Time to get rid of them. Unlike the mailers or newsletters, these PR mails do not have unsubscribe links. So, I wrote personal emails to each of them, politely asking to remove me from their list. It surprisingly seemed to have worked. All those PR mails have stopped.
Filter out the adamant ones: Some companies make it hard to unsubscribe. They want you to login to their system with a username and password. Of course, its a trick. I had never registered in these sites. So, I just create an email filter to have them deleted even before these useless mails hits my inbox.
Ta Da!
I have a really tidy inbox now. Its such a great feeling to start the day with.
Is your inbox clean? If not, take action now. Clean inboxes are a big time saver.
