We’ve all been working and living out of the same spaces for months now. How’s your house looking? My guess is if we were suddenly to be allowed to have others in our homes, most of us would have an almighty panic!
Is it possible that the messiest place in your home is your email inbox? How have you even found your way to discern that this is worth reading, in amongst all the varied correspondence which lies in wait?
Can we suggest it might be time for a spring clean of your emails?
Most of us are on a lot of mailing lists. We get ads from companies we purchased something from three years ago and announcements from organisations we’re no longer part of. We probably delete most of these emails unread.
Here are some top tips for decluttering, so you can pay attention to the important and helpful emails…
- Clear out from the back. Newer emails get the attention, so the best place to start is with your oldest unread messages. Even if you only answer or delete the oldest three, you’ll have made a start.
- Unsubscribe from those newsletters you never read. Search for ‘unsubscribe’ and all the mailings you can unsubscribe from will come to the top. Try ‘from: no-reply’ to uncover automated emails from companies. Check your bin for unread emails – that will give you a clue of what mailings you don’t need. As you go through each step, unsubscribe from everything you don’t actually read or need.
- Set up a folder for the emails which could inspire and encourage you, and set aside to read these each week. Now you’ve got rid of the junk, you might want to subscribe to one or two which will bring the kind of help you really need at the moment. Here are some recommendations from our colleagues…
Have a look through these suggestions from our colleagues. Remember you can filter the list by theme – don’t subscribe to anything out of obligation, and if something turns out not to be useful, just unsubscribe!
