Is your e-mail inbox becoming bloated? How much of that is your fault? We find that many people contribute to their e-mail overload by indiscriminately subscribing to newsletters and social networking groups that they rarely use. When it gets to be overwhelming it is time to consider an e-mail diet.
How We Contribute To Our Own E-mail Bloat
Each time you join a group or download a “free” eBook you are giving someone permission to help clog your inbox. It doesn’t seem like much when you sign up for these things. But when these messages begin to pour into your box you either delete them or allow them to pile up. have you considered the cost?
It happend to me recently. Since I began doing more business online, I’ve been on a quest to learn more about it. As a result I joined countless newsletter mailing lists and received probably thousands of helpful solicitations from these “experts.” I justified this by telling myself that I was building a library of information.
Recently I started to pay attention to how much time and energy I spend considering, deleting or moving theses messages. It was quite a lot and i realized it was time to cut back.
You can only consume so much information. If you allow too many controllable messages into your inbox (and your brain) you are forced to decide what you want to keep and what you don’t…several times a day. Each of these tiny decisions uses some of your very limited energy and attention.
Over the course of a day this energy drain adds up. To avoid wasting needless time and energy on this detritus, cut it off at the source. it’s time for an E-mail Diet.
4 Steps To an E-mail Diet
Here are the steps:
- Perform an e-mail audit to determine your level of E-mail bloat
- Sort your inox by the From column.
- Determine which senders are necessary, unnecessary Like to Have or just plain spam.
- Keep the Necessary messages, use rules to automatically move the Like-to-Have messages to your folders and op-out of any distribution lists that generate the Unnecessary messages. Use your Junk Mail tool or spam filter to keep it out our your inbox altogether.
On Tuesday I’ll show you how to do a quick e-mail audit and even provide you with a simple tool to tally the results. On Thursday I will post the first in a series of Outlook Time Savers which will show you how to use a shortcut in Outlook to create rules to automatically move your Like-to-Have messages automatically.
The most important this is to be aware. Weight loss coaches teach “If you bite it , write it.” Same thing with e-mail. When you find yourself deleting more messages than you read, it’s time to do some trimming.
Have a good week!
-Bob
Photograph by verbeeldingskr8 (Check out her stuff it’s very cool)
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