Over the years, I have subscribed to various e-mailings. In addition, some folks have taken it upon themselves to also send me lots of e-mail. For every important piece of email I was getting, there must have been five that were very low priority. And there were many that I didn’t want at all.
It was a huge daily distraction to have to scroll through them all, sort them, and delete them.
So I finally got around to setting up the online filtering tool on my email. (This is different from the Spam filter, that was already set up.) I came up with several categories: Mostly jokes, Catholic, Political, Sales, E-newsletters, etc.
Since then, I have been relentless in taking the time to reroute something out of my regular email to the online filtering system. I was also relentless in unsubscribing to mailings I no longer wanted. I would be in the middle of an important project and if one of these emails came through, I would stop, log onto the Internet, and set up the filter to reroute to one of the holding folders.
It has worked out well. Now I review these emails on my laptop, usually in the evening when I’m relaxing watching TV. They don’t usually require a lot of attention or any action, so they are not such a burden anymore and I actually enjoy them more now. Most importantly, they don’t distract me from my work.
It’s really great to not have a cluttered inbox anymore.
