Spring Cleaning

We have now entered the all too brief time of year where the temperature outside is not too hot but not too cold, and when the mosquitos and blackflies aren’t yet biting. Windows get thrown open and those of us who aren’t winter warriors get our first prolonged dose of fresh air and sunshine in what feels like an eternity.

At my house we’ve been doing some spring cleaning, and a little preliminary yard cleanup. While the weather is good, I’m loath to stare at a screen unless trying to identify some new bug, plant, or rock that has caught my attention. However, there is a spring-cleaning task you may want to consider spending a little screen time on during those rainy days where not much else is getting done. Do you have a perpetual unread email badge, with a ridiculously large number that just seems to be getting larger? Is your inbox so full of promotional emails that you miss updates from your friends and family? Then it might be time to spring-clean your email.

One of the biggest steps you can take to managing your email is to unsubscribe from emails you no longer need. If you’re like me, a pretty big chunk of your email might be promotional. These could be emails from retailers you have made purchases from, those incessant “load your offers” emails for various loyalty programs, or distribution lists you may not remember even signing up for (and you may not have). Many of these you can safely unsubscribe from. I like to use Black Friday as my Unsubscribe Day for these types of emails.

Also, remember that in many cases it’s your choice whether you give out your email in the first place. I was taken aback during a retail experience recently where the cashier said, “I’m going to ask if you want to give us your email, but you don’t have to.” We’re so conditioned just to say yes, that we forget we can politely decline.

Using labels or folders (depending on what your email provider calls them) can help organize emails that you want to hold on to. For instance, I subscribe to email newsletters that I know I won’t read right away. So, I have a rule created in my inbox to label them as a newsletter. That way when I want to catch up, I can just click on that label to see my backlog of newsletters. If my backlog of newsletters gets too big, I can also mass delete them using that label (they’re newsletters, they aren’t that important). I have also used folders for volunteer efforts I’ve been a part of, but in this case it is to keep those emails all in one place and easier to access.

A note on mass deletion – don’t just delete all your emails. Writer Merlin Mann introduced the concept of inbox zero in the early 2000s, and many took that to mean we should strive for zero emails in our inboxes, with some people going so far as to just delete everything. More recently, Mann has acknowledged that having a completely clear inbox is not practical and overwhelming to accomplish. Instead, pick one aspect of your email to focus on, like promotional emails or notifications, and clean those up. These are good tasks for a rainy day with a warm beverage.

Some email providers offer an archive feature. I like to use this feature for online purchase related emails. Many purchases come with at least 3 emails – an order confirmation, shipping notification, and delivery notification. I’ll usually archive these as they come in so I can still find them, but they aren’t cluttering up my inbox. Then, after a year or so (or after the warranty period), I’ll go into the archive and delete those as part of a regular cleanup. There is the chance that the archive can just turn into a doom-box where old emails linger semi-forgotten, but this only really becomes an issue if you start to exceed your email storage.

Don’t forget, you get to decide how much you engage with your email. If you are the type that likes to manage emails as they come in, great. If that stresses you out, then maybe set specific times of the day that you work through the day’s messages. People also have different tolerances for how their email is organized. If your inner peace isn’t negatively affected by a triple digit unread number, that is also okay. If you prefer a place for everything and everything in its place, there are tools for that. Basically, if you can find what you’re looking for when you need it, then the rest is down to personal preference.

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