davesacre

I woke up one morning and realized that every morning I was going through almost 15 emails a day that were just notification emails from websites that I signed up for.  There were daily deals from websites like NewEgg and Amazon as well as daily/weekly newsletters or sales or just information from other sites.  I realized that I was going through and just hitting “Mark as Read” on all of these emails.  It was taking up a few minutes of every day and was really starting to annoy me.

In the spirit of simplifying my life and getting rid of unnecessary inputs into it, I started opening up those emails and clicking “unsubscribe.”  It was a beautifully freeing feeling and I loved going through and knowing that I wouldn’t be bothered again by these companies.   I decided that I didn’t need to be tempted to buy more stuff and I didn’t need them wasting my time every day by telling me what I should be buying from them.  I also didn’t need to have a list of someone’s published articles this week because I added myself as a user on their website.

After I went through and unsubscribed from all the email lists I got that morning, I took a big deep breath and exhaled a great deep breath of happiness.

Then something awful happened.

I woke up the next morning to another 15 emails.  It was a whole other set of websites that happened to schedule their emails on a different day. I realized that it would be quite a process to eliminated years of forgetting (or not caring) to uncheck the “allow us to spam you” checkbox when signing up for accounts.

Everyday for a week, I had to repeat the process.  I’m still going through my email every morning and finding some of those useless subscriptions, but now it is significantly less.  If I have 6 “useless” emails every morning, that is a heavy “spam” day.

After talking with my brother-in-law about this he asked if I subscribed to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system at all.  I laughed and said that I tried it once and just couldn’t deal with it.  I really like the idea of GTD, but I think I lack the self-discipline to actually put that into place.  After chatting a bit about the email, he said that he really appreciated having an empty inbox and urged me to give it a try.  We dialoged back and forth a bit more about it and then moved on in conversation.

After a couple days, I got back to thinking about our conversation and how freeing it had been to removing some of the constant emails into the inbox.  So, after some deliberation with myself, I decided to give the empty inbox thing a try.

I’m really enjoying it so far. I don’t have a system in place yet, but I’m generally replying to emails once I read them and then archiving them away.  I’m loosely basing my current archive method on the GTD Inbox to zero system, with a caveat that I’m still using the Inbox as a todo list.  Once I figure it out completely, I’ll fill you in with another post.