To Delete or Not to Delete

This past weekend I went through over 5,000 emails. This is NOT how I originally planned for my weekend to go. My thought was that I would spend it binge-watching Vikings and playing with my dog Bourbon. It all changed when I talked to a friend. He told me about how an important email was accidentally added to his Spam folder, so he didn’t see it for several weeks. The result was a personal nightmare for any ex-pat - international banking issues. Oftentimes we forget digital clutter, like emails, is still clutter. Why worry about something that you can not physically see? The thing is - if you have a smartphone - you most likely can see it. That red growing number on your phone of things to read/ listen to/ take action on/ etc., really can affect us on a deeper level. After I talked to my friend and heard about his experience, paranoia over what those 1,417 emails said began to creep in. It was not knowing the information they held or didn’t, that pushed me to take on the task of decluttering. When I started on Saturday, I had 1,417 unread emails. As of today, I am proud to say I am at zero.

“Inbox Zero” is a term that Merlin Mann, a productivity expert, coined. I ran across it in a Youtube search for email productivity hacks. (Yes - I am that person the believes that you can learn ANYTHING via Youtube). In 2004, Mann founded the blog 43 Folders, focusing on "finding the time and attention to do your best creative work." It was here that he wrote a series of posts suggesting “Inbox Zero.” The word “zero” has nothing to do with the total number of messages in your inbox. It’s “how long it takes to use the inbox” so that you could save more time and money in the long run.

When I started my declutter of my inboxes (I have three emails), I saw things I had not seen in years. I haven’t lived in Hawai’i for almost six years, and I still received notifications from local businesses in Honolulu. Not good. I also found that I received a “Russian Word of the Day” email that was being automatically filed in a separate folder. I had close to 500 emails that were never even opened! The worst, though, was finding an essential mortgage document that had been lost in the clutter. Like my friend, this has led to some current issues that can be tough to solve when the embassy is shut down. At any rate, I wouldn’t have missed it if I wasn’t receiving 20+ emails every day and only checking it when I was really bored at the dog park. Things needed to change.

The first thing going forward, I needed to unsubscribe to the email lists I was on. Thanks to Unrollme.com, I was able to see that I was subscribed to over 325 sites just on one email address! Unrollme is fantastic because you can click unsubscribe for each site listed instead of opening the email, scrolling to the bottom, clicking unsubscribe, and then clicking why you are unenrolling in the emails. It’s a massive time saver. Although, the question stuck with me. Why did I have so many subscriptions? Then I recalled my old desk job. There I would constantly check my email throughout the day. At the time, I was only getting about 5-7 emails a day, not enough to fill the eight hours of constantly checking it at my desk. So, I signed up for anything that looked interesting. Literally, anything. I thought the problem was solved! Now every time I check my email, I’ll see something new. Little did I know my problem was starting. While I saw new emails, I wasn’t taking any actions on them or the old ones, so they piled up.

Now that I was unsubscribed from anything coming in, I needed to go through my inboxes and all my folders. This is where I put on a good Youtube playlist and dove in. Things from before 2020 that weren’t important were automatically deleted. That is all the receipts I was saving, emails from friends during grad school about meeting up to study, internal comms from volunteer organizations I was a part of, all of which were cleared out. If it was an email that hadn’t been open since 2021, it was reviewed and then 9/10 deleted. I’m not going to say it was fast but seeing those numbers of unopened emails get lower and lower was a big motivator. I did end up with many unopened newsletters from this Russian think tank in Washington, DC, that I follow. I had a dilemma -to delete or not to delete. I find their articles so interesting but, was I going to take the time to really read them all? The thing that came to mind at the moment was my sister’s husband, Ty. Ty also receives newsletters and other interesting emails that he rarely has time to read as the Senior Vice President & Controller of a bank. What does he do? He saves them, and then when he and my sister goes on vacation, he prints them out to read on the plane. Genius. I had to decide if I found these newsletters interesting enough to do that with. I decided against it, to the delete box they went. I was one step closer to inbox zero.

My sister Kandace and I talk almost every day. When I called to confirm that Ty still printed all those emails and get her opinion on email organization, she said that she had only six emails in her work email inbox right now. How?! Kandace is the Director of People (Human Resources) at a huge organization offering unique ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) services to those in need. She said that her goal was to reduce the chaos when she got online every day. There was nothing worse than opening up an inbox with hundreds of emails. Kandace also said she uses an application called Boomerang that will allow her to receive emails when she actually needs them. As the Boomerang website puts it, “Want a cleaner inbox, but don't want to lose track of important messages? Just click the Boomerang button when you have an email open, and choose when you need it again. Boomerang will archive your message. At the time you choose, we'll bring it back to your inbox, marked unread, starred, or even at the top of your message list.” Maybe she really is the smart one.

From now on, I aim to look at EVERY email that comes in and automatically decided what to do - or not do - with it. I updated my folders and color-coded them for what I need them for now. My hope is that it will be easier to decide where an email goes if I decide to keep it. After all, as the professional organizer Peter Walsh said, “Clutter is not just the stuff on your floor – it’s anything that stands between you and the life you want to be living.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.