Cleaning up the "email" overload
When is "too much", really too much?
I read a lot of newsletters. Or, at least I used to. Over the last couple of months, I did not have the energy or the motivation to read the newsletters that I was reading each day or week. Reading quantity slowly fell off until it totally stopped before surgery. After my return home, the emails started piling up. To perhaps over 2,000 at last count. And these are newsletters alone.
Thankfully, hosting my own domains on Google allows me to have separate Gmail accounts for different types of use - four at last count - one for the newsletters, one for personal emails, one for work emails (on work domain), and one for finances and bills. This allows me to handle these independently and not cluttering each other.
As I start re-reading my newsletter, I find that after a couple of months of break I do not miss most of them. Perhaps over 80% of them. And tomorrow will be a declutter project where I am going to evaluate and unsubscribe to all that I don’t care about anymore.
These newsletters have been built up (pruned and maintained) over a long period of time, perhaps over 5 years. I do realize that I do have the “Fear of missing out” - the FOMO factor and that means while I easily sign up for stuff, I struggle with unsubscribing and letting things go.
And I will certainly update in a future post on how well I kept this commitment!
PS: There are several things that I first experiment with and then write about. A few things like today I first noodle about it in the post and then propose to act. The presence of anxiety means it is quite an effort to sit down and actually unsubscribe. Unsubscribing is the easy part. The letting go part, not so much.