I am drowning in email. At the moment, there are 225 unopened emails in my account. There’s also at least 4 times that many sitting there in my multiple inboxes waiting for some action.
I have four separate main email accounts that get used regularly. There’s also a bunch that get forwarded to one of these main four.
Every day or two, I go through and mass delete hundreds of unread messages just based on the sender and subject.
I save (by not deleting) those that I think might be interesting, useful, or necessary at some point. And then every week or so, I again go though everything deleting those that made it through the first round but are now no longer interesting, useful, or necessary.
It’s highly inefficient.
And this doesn’t include all the spam comments and feedback that show up on Financial Slacker. With those, I used to go through the items marked as spam to make sure they were actually spam. More than once, I found messages that had incorrectly been tagged as spam.
But I’m not sure that’s possible now. There’s only so much time in the day that I am willing to dedicate to message cleanup.
This also doesn’t include the social media direct messages and texts that I receive.
And to top it all off, I know that not only is this taking time away from other more productive activities, but I’m also not consistently responding to messages very well.
I would love to hear back from others in the comments about how they deal with the overwhelming number of messages we all receive.
I have no advice; I am in a similar boat. For awhile I caught up and stayed caught up-but then the holidays happened. Usually I go though my emails in the morning and either delete or move emails to different folder. I keep the ones that need more attention in my in box until I no longer need it. The problem with this is that I don’t often go back to my folders to re-examine why I kept them in the first place.
Would something like Unenroll Me ( https://unroll.me/) help?
I’ll check out unenroll.
I used to do the same thing with folders, but all that did was move the problem from my inbox to the folder.
I’m ruthless about removing email I don’t use. For example, I only subscribe to a few websites for email updates, and rely on an RSS reader for the rest.
Emails from Enwealthen I address promptly, e.g.comment moderation. I only check spam comments once a month, if that. Akismet has done a great job of flagging spam with few false positives.
For social media, I’ve eliminated all email notifications. I check my accounts on my schedule, and act as needed.
There are always some emails sitting in my inbox waiting attention, but they’re usually long term projects, e.g. email courses.
I know some people try to maintain “inbox zero”. I don’t think that’s an effective strategy for most. But it’s up to everyone to decide what prices works best for them. Personally, I rely on mail filters to keep my inbox clear of everything automated. This way I can see direct emails to me quickly, and decide when I want to read any of the others.
Thanks for the suggestions, Jack.
Sounds like you have a pretty good system in place. I’ll be taking a look to see where I can make some changes.