Tuesday, January 9, 2018

My Inbox Update.

Hey hey friends!!  Today's post is a follow-up from last week's Confessions post about my embarrassing email hoarding tendencies.  

Rest assured, all you crazy zero inbox people.  I am now one of you.
#zeroinbox

After last week's post, I realized this...


I've typically been the one on the right.  I don't know why.  I don't do it on purpose.  But when I get 30 emails overnight and all of them are junk, I just quickly scroll past them when I'm groggily checking email in the morning and move on with my life.  When you have thousands there already, it's pretty easy to just give up.

But y'all's comments were hilarious and I felt appropriately shamed into working on this.  Which was kind of my reason for the post to begin with.  Tell the world my secret and then feel the pressure to fix it.  (Maybe I should use this approach to drop those 10 pounds I've been meaning to lose for the past (??) number of years.)

I started working on it hard last Thursday.  By Thursday around lunch time, I had worked it down to here.


I decided that not only do I need to delete emails, I need to be proactive when dealing with the huge influx of emails I get on a daily basis.  So I logged into my unroll.me account that I set up years ago and then pretty much just forgot about.  But this website will help you!!!  

You can easily unsubscribe from anything you may be subscribed to and you can take the stuff you do want to see and "roll it up".  This just means it puts all these subscriptions in one email that unroll.me sends you.  So all of the subscriptions equate to just one email instead of a hundred.  I ended up just unsubscribing to almost everything and then leaving the very few set to just go to my inbox like normal.  

I posted this to my Instagram stories.  Unsubscribed from 793!!!!  #boom


Let me tell you, I was feeling ALL the motivation and inspiration to keep pushing forward!  I was determined to knock this out and be a "zero inbox" kind of girl.  ;)

At one point, after I'd been deleting emails like some kind of maniac for an hour, I went to empty my trash folder (don't forget to do this!!) and this popped up!  Holy cow, man.


It kind of confused me because at the time I had around 17,000 emails showing on the red bubble so I couldn't figure out why I could delete more than I actually had.  But I forgot that the red bubble is showing how many UNREAD emails you have.  Not how many total.  

By Friday, I had gotten down to this...


WHAT?!!  Mind boggled.  It can be done, y'all!! 

And then, Friday night, I did it.


I felt SO PROUD.  And so free!!

So if you're like me and you want to get this under control, here are some of my tips!  And I did all of this from the desktop site.  I wouldn't try this from your phone.  You'll end up wanting to smash your head into a wall.

(For the record, I'm a gmail girl so this may or may not help you if you aren't a gmail user.)

1. I obviously couldn't just select all and then delete everything.  There were definitely emails I needed that were scattered throughout those 20,000+ that I needed to keep.

So if you're like me, start here!  I had emails that dated back to 2012.  I decided I could delete EVERYTHING that was sent from 2012-2016.  Surely, there was nothing in there that was life or death.

#letshope

Start by tapping whatever this number is.  You'll see a dropdown box that says "newest" and "oldest".


Click on Oldest and it'll pull all your oldest emails up.  From there, I just did "select all" on each page and deleted.  I set mine to show 100 emails per page to make it go quicker so if you need to do that then go into your settings and change it to "show 100 conversations per page".  It'll make deleting things page by page go faster.


So this definitely took some time.  After a while I got another idea though and it may have helped things go faster or maybe it didn't??? I don't really know.  But this is another way you can delete a lot at once.

2.  Go into your search bar and type in an email you see on repeat.  I did "boutique" and a ton came up because I'm an online boutique addict.  (Also "pizza".  That was a big one too.)  I knew all of these could be deleted without me having to scan them.  So I just did select all and delete!  I didn't grab any screenshots of that or I'd show you.

3.  I have folders that say Social and Promotions.  I don't even remember setting them up but maybe I did?  Anyway, one is for "social" (blog comments, facebook, instagram, etc) and one is for Promotions (everyone trying to sell me stuff).  You can click on the tab and feel pretty safe if you want to delete all in one swoop.  Important emails don't go there unless you think the latest J.Crew sale is important.  (Because I definitely do sometimes.)


If yours isn't already set up like this, you can do it in your settings under "inbox".

I have always regularly emptied these two folders because it is so simple.

4.  And finally, I added some more folders/labels to help me sort and organize by subject.  I get emails with questions about the blog, questions about that "magic" coffee (read that review here if you haven't already...I'm still in love and apparently hundreds of you are too now!), stuff with my Etsy shop, orders for supplies, orders for fun stuff, travel...

Here's what that looks like now.


So now if I get an email from one of my kids' teachers, I can label it "school" and it'll go to the folder.  So I can just click on that school folder to keep track of all the emails I've labeled as school-related without having to search my inbox.  

This may be pretty Email 101 for some of y'all but I've never really given it much thought before!  

I'll never be able to explain all the technical stuff but if you search "zero inbox" on Pinterest there will be lots of good stuff that will come up to help.  I am sure most of those people have way better tips than me too.

So there ya go!  I did it.  Super proud.  And I'm promising right now that I'll keep this up and it will NOT get out of control ever again.

And if it's just the red bubble that drives you crazy, do what I did once I got down to about 550 and was just TIRED.  Select all then "mark as read".  Bam.  No more red bubble.

I've gotta be honest.  I was kind of kicking myself for not just doing that a long time ago. ;)

Hope this helps you if you are a crazy (former) email hoarder like me!!  Don't forget to empty your trash bin!  It's sooooo satisfying!!

Remember that you can follow me on Instagram here and join my Facebook group here.  

And my Etsy shop is in full swing too!  Go here to check that out!

Have a great day and thank you for all your tips!

And just because...









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5 comments

  1. I did this same thing driving back from Atlanta! I didn’t have as many as you, but I got it under control and it feels good!!

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  2. Girl, I'm glad my twitch can go away now that your email is at ZERO! HA :) But for real, I know that has to feel so much better.!

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  3. I did this a couple of years ago and then let it go again...don’t let it happen to you! LOL. I’ve done my unsubscribing now I need to go in and delete the 10,000+ unread emails :(

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  4. I agree with Heather! ;) Way to go on organizing. The tips are really helpful, especially going through and searching for something like "pizza" to delete. here's to a fresh new year!

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  5. Thanks for the tips and seriously you motivated me!! I have always been the same way, numerous junk coming in and I just scroll on by! Not anymore! I'm taking back my inbox!!

    ReplyDelete

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