-
Clearing The Digital Clutter :-)
After today’s Momentum Coaching Mastermind call, I was inspired by Kelly. She shared how she’s recently deleted a bunch of people from her mailing list and how her email inbox is a special space and I giggled (but was so envious) when I saw how FEW emails she had in there.
So, I spent quite a bit of time today going through my mailing list and weeded out a lot of people (I had people from a 2018 bundle I did that were moved over to Active Campaign a year ago, from Aweber, and not one of them had opened or clicked a link in an email. Boom – deleted.
I’m kind of embarrassed how little my list is now (I mean it was never big to begin with but at least it was 3 digits, now it’s 2 digits small 😏) AND it’s also kind of exciting to feel like I have a fresh start with it… if that makes sense.
But what was most time consuming and I’m definitely most proud of is my inbox. I went from 300+ emails in there (some sooo old and I was saving because “one of these days I’ll do something with this information.”) to 20!
20!!! Only 20 emails in my inbox… you guys, do you know how AMAZING and FREEING this feels???!!! Tomorrow, I will finish going through those last 20 emails and seeing if I need to do something with them or can just delete.
I also went through my paid courses/training folder where I save all the PDF files that go with something I purchased. I had stuff in that folder from way back in 2016. Boom – deleted! And I narrowed that Dropbox folder down to very few files and again, such a freeing feeling.
Now, to stop being a digital clutter hoarder! 😀
-
7 Replies
-
Whoo-hoo – congrats on taking that action. I need to do a purge myself and you just prompted me to put that in my calendar.
-
Holy smokes Tish! Great clearing out and reclaiming space 🤩
-
Thanks Mary Elizabeth & Kelly! It felt sooooo good to open my inbox this morning. I didn’t feel overwhelmed or dreading it, like I had been in the past. I’ve noticed today I’ve been a bit frantic to immediately do something with any emails that come in – I don’t want to keep anything in there that is going to start building up the clutter again 😝
-
Congrats on the incredible de-cluttering!
It’s on my to-do list to setup some engagement automations w/ tagging and then do re-engagement campaigns to work to weeding some of my list.
It’s always hard to do when we spend so much time to build and grow an email community, but like gardening we gotta weed to stay healthy. my head knows it, gotta get rest of me on board 😆
I hear you about the email inbox too – I make it a habit to use labels and color coding, to filter and triage – because let’s be honest, especially in the inbox with all the newsletters and marketing emails, few of them are truly urgent. Oh, the senders think they are urgent for whatever is on sale, but I gotta have discipline on my end – and usually it’s not earth-shattering if I’m late or miss something. But we gotta train ourselves there too, right?
I admit my inbox is not zero and likely never will be – mostly b/c of way brain wired, if some things are out of sight, they become literally ‘out of mind’ – so if I archive those emails I’ll forget something I shouldn’t. Even if it’s in Trello or elsewhere. I’m sure I need a better system! And to follow my own damn advice and just ACT on the thing.
But cheers to you for all the cleanup!
-
That is amazing! Congratulations! 🤩 I was looking at my business inbox this morning and I see so many things that don’t belong there. To me, they are sales stuff from box stores, etc. Obviously, I ordered from them for my business or they bought my email. Either way, they are taking up so much space and visually cluttering the things I do need to look at. I am totally resolving that issue. I can’t stand digital clutter. It makes me totally unable to focus.
-
Tracy, clean that inbox out! It’s such a freeing feeling :-) My inbox is still down to no more than 10 messages left in there a day – I would really like to get that down to 0 but I am happy considering what it used to be like!
-
Jennifer, I’ve tried the label thing in my inbox and set stuff up but what happens is things get filtered in there and I NEVER go read those emails or do anything with them. So next up in my digital declutter is to go through all those labels (I have TONS of them lol) and figure out if there really are any worth saving and if not, I’m getting rid of all that stuff too!
I like your analogy of gardening and our list building (weeding things out) :-)
