In my last post, I talked about clutter around our homes, including quick tips on how to keep your spaces clutter-free. (Read more here: What Kind of Clutterer are You?) In this post, I am talking about one of the biggest clutter types that I deal with: Digital!
The clutter issue that I have is with digital clutter. There are so many emails that come in each day that I am overloaded with information. Between personal and business email accounts, if I don’t stay on top of it daily, I will be bogged down for hours dealing with email clutter. It is draining!
This is probably my main issue since I am an email addict! I prefer to have things in writing so that I don’t have to remember everything.
I unsubscribe from email mailing lists (Unsubscribe.com) that I am not interested in and I have some emails go directly to my Spam folder. I can do a quick glance through the Spam folder and only read the titles that catch
my attention before deleting. For emails containing information I need to remember or respond to, I do a quick sort and either print a PDF copy to my desktop folder (Primopdf.com), answer the email, or read and delete. Making an immediate decision keeps the email chaos to a minimum.
I have seen inboxes full of hundreds of read emails that were not sorted. Once they are read and responded to, it is a good idea to delete or archive the email so that the inbox only contains the current information that needs to be dealt with.
Gmail holds hundreds of archived emails and lets me put a star next to an important email which gives me a place to store information that I might need later but don’t need now. It is a good idea to go through the saved email folders once a month and make sure they are still relevant.
This is also my strategy for voice mail. I only listen to the message one time and write down the info. Then I delete the message so that the inbox is empty. I need to keep digital clutter to a minimum for the sake of my sanity! There is too much chaos in the world and keeping my life and my emails organized, helps to calm the busyness.
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