While not technically part of your home, your email inbox is just one more thing that most of us have to deal with (or should be dealing with) on a daily basis. I got an email from Google apps (which runs our company email) yesterday and learned that I have the dubious honor of being the person that receives the most email in our company. Yes, more than my mother, who also receives most of her personal email through that email address and generally has 4000+ unread email messages at any given time. (It’s because of her that I learned that the iPhone will display 5+ numbers of unread messages – she was over 10,000 unread at one point. Yikes!) All that to say, I know a little something of which I speak. Of course, my person email account isn’t generally quite as clean.
If you’re starting with a ton of emails, start by deleting messages from people you don’t know, newsletters that you’ll never read (or that are older than a month), messages from people that are just junk or hoaxes, and messages from benevolent Nigerians or others who claim to have money for you.
Next, either sort by sender or search from a sender that you have a lot of email messages from. Start deleting the ones you don’t need: issues you don’t care about, outdated emails that are still left after your first pass.
If you’re using gmail, archive the emails that you think you might need some day. You have a lot of storage available and can always search for them later. The idea is to get them out of your inbox so you can pay attention to what is important as it comes in.
Worst case scenario? Do what I do periodically for my mom’s inbox. Declare email bankruptcy. Select anything that is older than a week and archive it. I don’t even bother to look through it. If you need it, you can always search for it.
31 Days 2016 - Reset Your Home
This post is a part of the series 31 Days to Reset Your Home, part of the 31 Days challenge. Please join me during the month of October. Each day I’ll be posting what I’m working on, challenges so you can join in, and update my progress (and hopefully hear about yours!). The 31 Days challenge is a writing challenge to pick a topic and write a post on it every day in October.
- 31 Days to Reset Your Home
- Resetting Your Morning Routine
- Resetting Your Evening Routine
- Resetting your Weekly Routine
- Declutter Week: Paper
- Declutter Week: The Left Behinds
- Declutter Week: The On Purpose
- Declutter Week: The Kitchen Pantry
- Declutter Week: Your Schedule
- Lovely Links – Oct 10
- In Other News – Kitchen Renovation Progress
- Deep Cleaning: Master Bedroom
- Deep Cleaning: Bathrooms
- Deep Cleaning: Living Room
- Deep Cleaning: The Kitchen
- After the Deep Clean
- A Good Sleep
- Another Kitchen Update
- Maintaining – How to Create a Habit
- The Art of Stress Free Productivity
- Resetting Your Email