Less Email Clutter | Organize Your Internet Life

My name is Emmy and I am a Pretty Bella (at least I hope to be one some day). A Pretty Bella is a girl on the move who is both fashionable yet carries a simple lifestyle. A simple lifestyle can mean many things to many people. To me, it means a clear mind with a clear conscious. However, its impossible to have a clear conscious with daily headaches from the never ending inbox.


Take a look at my AOL inbox:



I get 200ish new emails everyday! And I have 7 other email accounts as well! (for a total of 500 new emails everyday)


It doesn't take me much to delete emails. According to the National Technology Readiness Survey and Maryland's business school, the average time spent per day deleting spam messages is 2.8 minutes. Doesn't sound like much right? But you're time is valuable. Nearly 80 percent of e-mails sent worldwide are spam, and research has shown that junk communications can cost billions - and not just because companies have to buy extra computer capacity to cope with the influx of e-mails. The time employees spend deleting junk e-mail costs companies nearly $22 billion a year, according to a recent survey.


So lets do this:


1) Unsubscribe from everything and everything, this includes the daily deals sites. Yes, you might kick yourself if you miss that awesome Groupon deal, but really now are most of your DAILY emails from Groupon about spas that, even with the discounts, are a bit out of your budget? Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe.


but I really want to see what the daily deals are! Then create a email address specifically for deals, promotions, sweepstakes, and periodically look at those emails, mass deleting everything when you're done. But keep your personal email clean. The cleaner your inbox, the more organize and level-headed you will feel, trust me.

          It feels so good seeing all of those unsubscribe request confirmations emails!

2) If it looks like spam, DON'T unsubscribe, but mark 'spam' and delete. I kept getting random porn emails on a previously own Yahoo account, and I unsubscribed. Unfortunately my spam ten-folded! Why? When you mark 'unsubscribe' on spam emails, what you are really doing is confirming that your email address is authentic with an actual person reading daily, and not just a random inbox that is never looked at. You become $$$ to spammers of Viagra drugs, Sexy Video Chat lines, etc 

3) If you are unemployed, do you really need to see daily articles on how to write resumes and cover letters? I receive about 3 emails daily from Monster informing me about industries that are hiring, cover letters I should be writing, interviewing etiquette, etc. The first few emails are very informative, but after a while the emails become more of the same. I mean do you really need to know that engineers make over 60K if you majored in History? The economy is tough right now and if you're unemployed, you're main responsibility should be applying for jobs. These emails while at first are beneficial, in the end they are a daily negative reminder that you are unemployed. So remove them, and continue to apply for jobs. You do not need reminders of your current situation.


4) Remove Facebook, Youtube, Twitter notifications. All of your notifications are already on the site every time that you visit, why do you need individual emails telling you that "that picture is awesome" from your cousin? Your time is valuable and you are probably already on Facebook way too much. 

With that said, if you are on YouTube and upload videos, remove your YouTube notifications as well. Have more than 100 friends on Twitter? remove your notifications.

Too many Twitter notifications? unmark everything and click save!

5) DO IT NOW. the more time you wait around, the more emails are going to accumulate. Unfortunately, while I would love to have a free personal assistant who will do everything for me, I don't and most likely you don't. SO DO IT NOW, get it over with, remove all of that email clutter.

out of sight, out of mind.  Lets start organizing our lives!