How I eliminated email clutter in two steps

Email is great way to communicate, but outside corporate world, the use of email has become minimum.

I do receive hundreds of emails at my work email address, but at my personal email address, I hardly get any email which is directly addressed to me. Most of the emails I receive are newsletters or notifications. And I find myself deleting most of the emails without even reading them.

This is obviously a waste of time. Even if I am spending one hour a day just checking and deleting my emails, I would rather spend that time doing something constructive. So I decided to eliminate this email clutter and save myself from the agony of checking and deleting my emails.

Here is how I did it in two steps.

1. For every new email that I received, I asked myself what difference it would make if I never received that email.

2. If the answer to above question was ‘not much’, then I took steps to make sure I never receive that email again.

After step 2 I had already eliminated 90% of the clutter as the volume of emails received daily had reduced by over 90%. I used to get 100+ emails a day, but now I get less than 10 emails a day.

Examples of emails that you can block from your inbox are newsletters that you never read, notifications that you don’t care about, promotions that don’t interest you, and so on. If you are simply deleting these emails then obviously it’s not worth your time to read those, then why even receive those emails at first place. Go ahead and unsubscribe to those newsletters, block the notifications from facebook and twitter, and blacklist any spam-like promotions that you were never interested in.

The key is to keep repeating these two steps from time to time. It is perfectly normal to subscribe to a newsletter to see how it is, but after a while if you are only deleting the emails then it is better to unsubscribe. And internet has a way of finding your email address and start sending you strange emails. So rinse and repeat the two steps every few weeks and you will never see too many unwanted emails.

And as far as this question is concerned that how do you stay in touch with friends if you don’t use email, so the answer to that question is that these days social networks are more common for staying in touch rather than email. I hardly get any email from my friend just to stay in touch. Facebook has been serving this purpose effectively.

Most news websites and blogs also have Facebook page these days, including my blog, so I just like the Facebook page instead of subscribing to them via email.

Now I spend less than 10 minutes a day on my personal emails and more time on things that are truly meaningful.

So how many emails do you get in a day? Do you read all of them? If not, try my method and let me know how it went.