I’ve got too much mail in my inbox. How does this happen? We save it so we have it, we don’t want to delete it, but it keeps piling up!
It’s time to go through my mail, see what’s worthwhile getting rid of the rest. While doing so, it’s also time to take action on what needs action, filing the rest in a place to follow up or throw it out.
A major problem with email is that we get a lot of email from people (who have permission to send us mail) but we never read it because it’s a sales pitch. We still keep it because we paid for it, we might learn something from it or we want to be in the know. Still, most of it is really junk and could be discarded.
Sometimes we sign up for things because we don’t want to miss out, we’re going to take action but we never get around to doing it. Mail gets buried that was sent months even years ago (not in my case because I do clean out fairly often).
Of course, we have the emails with usernames, with links to products that we buy and the sorts. We might even have a gift card with a number for online purchases.
The best we can do is to go through and organize the mail every day. Decide if we are going to take action or if this is something that we really will never use. Accumulation makes it so we never find anything anyway.
A book I read and liked called “Taking Back Your Life With Outlook” suggested sending an email out to everyone saying you just deleted your inbox in whole and to resend any message that is necessary and has not been addressed. It’s tempting!
Tell me your strategies to cleaning out your inbox…