Every day, overwhelmed professionals are inundated with emails. Some that arrive are well-meaning and designed to help you, like mine. Others are trying to sell you something. Others are (sometimes terrible) pieces of junk mail. And that’s not counting the emails that are actually from colleagues, clients, and customers.
You can try a variety of things (services that consolidate emails, or a separate email address for sales flyers/newsletters, courses that give you tips and tricks, or even a VA to sort your inbox.) But there is one thing you can consistently do that will eventually make a major difference in the amount of legitimate email you have to process.
Unsubscribe from one email per day.
How do you decide whether to unsubscribe from an email? Here’s are some questions to help you decide:
- Why did I subscribe to this email in the first place? Is that reasoning still relevant?
- Do I open and read this email 80% of the time, within three days?
- Is the information in this email helpful and worth absorbing?
- Can I get this information in another way (i.e. RSS feed reader, visits to their website when convenient to you, their social media pages)?
- If the company suddenly stopped producing this email, would I miss it?
As a blogger who has subscribers, these are hard questions to suggest. It could very well mean that some of my own subscribers may decide to ditch “Breath of HOPE.” I hope they don’t, but because I’m coming to the realization that I absorb information from a variety of sources, an unsubscribe doesn’t mean lack of interest. And I try to put my blog out in various formats and places now because an important goal is to serve people where they are.
So go ahead. Apply the above questions to my blog. But make sure you also do it for others. Find one email a day you can unsubscribe from until what you receive is really what benefits you.
Image by Denis Bogdan from Pixabay