Email Overload

So it was raining outside Saturday and I decided to spend the first part of my day ruthlessly going through my emails in one of my accounts. Sometimes you just have to be honest with yourself about email and say "Hey, I haven't read any of these emails in over a year and I'm not going to"!

This particular email account has over 13,000 plus messages in my inbox! Yes, you read that right! Now as a professional organizer I should know better, but I have over 6 other email accounts that I have to keep up with and so I have just let this one be the catchall and skim through daily for the emails that need my response. All other emails go unread unfortunately. This has lead to a backup of 13,000 messages in my inbox.

So today I am inspired to clean out my over bloated inbox and come up with a system to keep more on top of it. Here is what I am doing:

1. I'm using the nifty search feature to pull up certain emails that I know that I don't read and mass deleting them.
2. I am unsubscribing from any email that I have not bothered to even look at! (this is a hard one because some I really did have good intentions of reading, but alas I am only one person.)
3. Since I have about two years of these emails I am starting with the oldest emails first since many are expired information anyway. This makes the clean up process a heck of a lot faster.
4. I'm taking my time. Because it is not feasible to think that I am going to get through all of these emails in one sitting. But if I do a hour or two a day I should have a nice and tidy inbox in no time.

So that is it. Not a fun task but a task that must be done none the less. One good thing about this is that I will learn the lesson of not letting my inbox get to this stage ever again. Daily maintenance and careful thought of what emails I sign up for is the key to having a tidy inbox. I would love to hear from you about how you keep your email inbox clean. You may not have a many as me, but we can all learn from one another. I will keep you posted on my progress. Hopefully I will be able to show a tidy inbox before weeks end next week. Fingers crossed!