Decluttering your inbox
Day three’s NYT’s Wirecutter challenge is to declutter your inbox, something I struggle with. My personal inbox is a productivity killer. I visit it daily to catch up on the news and read my favorite newsletters. However, I often get overwhelmed by all of it and close my laptop. This only compounds the issue because numerous emails have charged in and invaded my inbox between the time I shut my laptop and the time I fire it back up. I feel my energy drain each time I look at it - especially because I feel compelled to read through most of them before deleting or filing.
Now, this is an interesting problem. Am I not the one who subscribes to the newsletters that end up in my inbox? There isn’t a house gnome who is subscribing on my behalf while I sleep. If my inbox were a room, I’d have stuff piled on every surface, and many items would still be in their original unopened box. So, how do I manage my unruly inbox?
Brittany Ho, the Wirecutter editor who wrote about this challenge, suggests selecting all of your messages and marking them as “read.” I know this will have an immediate effect, but I'm not sure if it’s good or bad for me. For some reason, I cannot click all of my emails and mark them as “read.” I think it’s because I want to see what I’m subscribed to and decide whether I want to keep receiving it.
Time to take charge. To reduce my list to a manageable size, I needed to come up with a series of questions and decide how I wanted my inbox to work for me. Otherwise, the emails would continue to pile up. I came up with three questions:
Does it provide valuable information that will help me with my goals?
Does it provide inspiration?
Does it spark joy?
Admittedly, I have subscribed to too many email lists, many of which I don’t read but think I should (such as numerous investment newsletters). We probably all have signed up for a list to receive a discount off a product and never unsubscribed (kudos to those of you who do that right away). As I went through them using the questions I came up with, I started looking at my emails in a different light. If the answer is “yes” to any of the three questions, I make a point to read or file them; otherwise, I thank them for serving a purpose at one point and hit “unsubscribe.” The good news is I can always re-subscribe if I miss them.
Do you struggle with a packed inbox, or do you have tips and tricks for taming the chaos?