How often do you fully clean out your personal email?
I usually always aim to do a big email clean out/ catch up on Fridays. But that does not always happen. So Plan B is anytime over the weekend. Sometimes even this gets away from me and I might end up with up to ~2 weeks’ worth of emails to sort.
Lately I’ve had more weeks when I feel like my inbox snowballs out of control.
Why? Various reasons, I think.
I don’t have a particular “weekday” personal email checking routine (though I probably should).
I mostly check my email on my phone (too many times per day), BUT, this is actually not great, because I don’t always tend to “deal with stuff” from my phone. (Example: I may quickly skim the swim team newsletter on my phone, but if there are action items required, like, say, signing up for a meet or buying a fundraiser raffle ticket…. I probably will just ignore that for the time being (assuming no urgent deadline). And the email will just hang out in my inbox until a later date. And then I’ll have to touch the same email later, again.)
Basically I just scan the emails on my phone for any “good stuff” (i.e. interesting or something to give me a little dopamine hit, lol, or anything urgent) and then save any actual “tasks” for later. I also rarely delete any emails from my phone, for some reason.
I used to be able to access Gmail on my work computer, so I tended to delete emails in random snippets of work time, like while waiting for a meeting to start. This really helped me to keep it under control on a daily basis. But sometime last year I think the hospital blocked all Gmail use for security reasons. It’s been a bit downhill since then. Ha.
I don’t actually use my personal laptop that often during the week….which is where I now need to do all my email triage….so…I tend to accumulate a good backlog by the end of the week.
Realistically I should probably help myself and just make a point to schedule 2 quick personal email sessions per day or something (on my laptop). Even if I don’t deal with all the action items right away, at least come Friday I could have ONLY actually important emails left to deal with.
This morning I got my inbox literally down to ZERO! I am going to try to be better this week and keep it closer to that! It’s just so hard because I swear they come in faster than I can delete them….
(I also need to help myself by unsubscribing from no longer needed promotional emails, lists, etc. I am bad about that….. 😫).
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for what felt like an all-around productive weekend.
GRATEFUL KAE 
it’s interesting that your work blocked gmail. I do a lot of box cleaning during working hours so I don’t feel the need to ‘work” on household tasks on my free time. good job on getting it to zero though… isn’t that satisfying?
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I’m very tidy with my work email but my personal email is a bit less organised. I am good at deleting promotional stuff during my commute, I open up “all mail” and delete from there, but I think I don’t get enough personal email directly sent to me anymore to keep it top of mind? I normally wait til it builds up to 75-100 and then go through and deal with it all. Looking at it now, it has about 100 emails but some of these are vinted purchases which have been received (need to set up rule), library notifications, etc.
The school either sends 0 emails for weeks or 6 in an hour, all with the same headline which makes me crazy. no sense of priority to them, they could say that the school is closed tomorrow or that the lunch menu has changed…
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Gmail and all of the google aps like google drive have been blocked at work since early 2017. I really miss having access to my personal email at work. I only use my work PC and my phone – I do not actually have a personal PC at home (hence the reason most of my blog posts and comments are written on my phone). If I really need a PC at home, I use Phil’s surface laptop but I rarely use it. So my email never gets cleaned out. I have a ridiculous number of messages there but it doesn’t bother me. I just ignore the total # of messages. It would be so much work to clean it out and get to inbox 0 and then I’d restart every week and it’s just not worth it to me.
My best trick for managing email is to mark anything you need to go back to as unread. So if I read something and there is a to do, I mark it as unread. I HATE having unread emails in my inbox so that means that I am more likely to do that task so I can mark it as read.
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I used to totally ignore my number of emails too- at one point a couple years ago I had 80,000 emails!!! Omg!!! Hahaha. I decided I wanted to clean it out and did a mass delete/archive thing and have kept it tidy ever since. I do like that idea of marking emails as unread. I really should just delete from my phone as I go too. But my phone pulls all the promotional emails in too so there are just SO many and it gets to be so many so quickly! And then I just give up sometimes.
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I’m somewhere between 80,000 and “inbox zero.” I don’t want to give the exact number (although you did make me feel better with that confession.) It’s so hard with all the promotional emails- I try to go through and delete them but it barely seems to make a dent. Okay, you’ve inspired me- I’m going to have an email cleanout at some point today.
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I have so many email inboxes that it stresses me out.
1) Primary personal – this one I’ve had for decades. It’s got tens of thousands of emails in it and when I am done with my volunteer position, I’m going to do a massive purge. I think this will take some time, but there’s no need for me to have emails in folder that I haven’t looked at in fifteen years.
2) Secondary personal – this one I used primarily for job search stuff and once I got a job, I was easily able to get it down to zero where it remains.
3) Volunteer – I have an email for the purpose of doing the job searches at the place where I volunteer. The inbox is relatively clean, but it is only active when we’re doing a job search. I am going to happily pass it on to someone else when I am done at the end of the year.
So…I’m not TERRIBLE, but I think my personal email will be a lot less stressful at the beginning of the year. My work email, though, I can already sense is going to be hard to organize!!
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Is it bad that I don’t have a system set up to deal with email? I have a few “filters” that get applied to incoming email (that helps) and I try to delete as I go (or file to “archive”), but I don’t think I had an inbox zero in quite a while. I should sit down and get it done and then hopefully “keep up with it”.
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I don’t know if I’ve ever had inbox zero. I am TERRIBLE about cleaning out my inbox, and use gmail as a virtual filing cabinet. I have 565 unread emails at this specific moment. Cringe cringe cringe. Just the thought of it stresses me out.
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Every day, even if I am not working. Go through, delete, delete, delete, if it needs addressing, then I place a star on it.
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So, for those of us still in the 10s of thousands in our Gmail (ahem, *guilty*), what was your process for your mass cleanout? Because there are definitely emails I need/want to save, but they are intermingled with a bunch of non-essential emails (e.g., daily check-in emails with my parents that are boring as all get-out…). Any suggestions?
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