Email Clutter
What do you think about Inbox Zero, the strategy of keeping your email inbox empty? Myth or Challenge? A few months ago, I saw it as a challenge, but honestly, I got bored pretty quickly and forgot about it. I don’t have an opinion on the virtuosity of Inbox Zero, but I do know that an email account littered with excessive promotions, unread newsletters, and unnecessary notifications can make the important stuff hard to see.
Last week I was having one of those days where my brain wasn’t good for anything but scrolling and obsessively checking email for anything that might spur me into action. All I was getting was promotions, so I started deleting large swaths of them at a time. My fingers got into a rhythmic flow and a day later, one email account went from 27,000 unread to ZERO. holy dopamine hit! What a rush! Seriously though, it’s really nice that the little notification numbers mean something again.
Here’s the rhythm I got into that turned out to be a pretty satisfying way to kill 10 minutes while waiting in line at the pharmacy, or 5 minutes while the laundry was still drying, or any of the short chunks of time you might otherwise be doom scrolling.
Open an email that is something you get often but don’t need to keep, like notifications of notifications, or promotional emails from companies you don’t shop at anymore.
You might need to click the address for it to expand and show you the whole from address,
Hold and copy this from address
go back to the inbox and paste the address into the search bubble.
Once all the emails from that address pop up, hold to select the top one,
look for a box to check that says select ALL, check it
delete them all. This last step might repeat a few times before all that can be loaded are deleted.
Go back to the inbox and repeat with a different email sender, foreeeeevvvvvvveeeeerrrrrrrrr
Note: I tried to do this on my mom’s Iphone 7 and there was no way to select ALL in step 6. Her options were to do this process on a computer or delete every single unlabeled email at once. This reminded me of one of my principles for non-judgmental organizing. We all have different relationships with our stuff. I would’ve panicked but she calmly watched 17000 emails disappear with no regrets. Goals? That’s up to you.
Happy Sorting!
P.S. Another way to keep a handle on your email clutter is to unsubscribe from mailing lists that you don’t open. If this makes you feel guilty, don’t! I’ve learned a lot about mailing lists since starting this blog, and if a subscriber doesn’t engage with your emails, it affects the “deliverability rate” and they’re more likely to go to spam for other people, so removing yourself from their list is actually doing them a kindness.