A couple of weeks ago, I posted: How to benefit from fewer: Email subscriptions, connections, friends, and followers. That post is a summary of clerical cleanup meant to lighten your load.

I blocked some free time, yesterday, to just address email subscriptions. Over time, I had accumulated an incredible number travel news (airlines, Priceline, etc.,), technology updates, software updates, events updates, updates, updates, updates…

When I took a critical view of the subscriptions, one-by-one, I was appalled at how many were coming in that I was setting aside for future view… and never actually read.

Here is what I found when digging into my email.

• For most of the subscriptions, simply unsubscribe. Or, if the sender gives you four options for news and promotional updates, downsize your subscription to the single most important choice.
• For the few subscriptions that you you really believe are important, create an email rule, within your email software. That way, any particular news source can be routed to its own sub-folder, within a master folder, titled News or Reading. This method drastically cuts down in-box clutter
  
• Three months later, you can visit your reading folders, again, and take a second look at what you picked for reading later. Then, prune a second time.
• As a by-product, I found that many email notifications from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were going unread, because they were unnecessary. I simply went to these social media sites and updated my contact preferences, reducing email to what was truly important.

You and I are in an era of unlimited information and communication choices. If one went on sabbatical, just to read, in any form, you could never keep up with the geometrically expanding supply of knowledge.

Please report back if you put a dent in your inbound email clutter.

Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Blog

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