From 30,418 Emails to Inbox 0
Down to 0 emails!
As someone who has been described as "the most organized person I've ever met" by multiple people on separate occasions, you might be surprised to hear that my inbox is a bit of a mess.
I have 3 main email addresses. My personal email, my email that's associated with this blog, and my work email. Though I've gone through big purges in the past with my work email, I haven't ever attempted to tackle the 30,000+ emails that have built up in my other inboxes.
You might be wondering how I got to 30,000+ emails (or maybe you're wondering how I don't have more!). Here's a little bit of a back story… over the years I've signed up for many a newsletter and have done a lot of online shopping (which typically adds you to an email list). Then I let all of those emails just sit, thinking "maybe I'll look at them someday" or "maybe I'll use that coupon code someday." Sometimes I'd go through and delete/unsubscribe, but not on a regular basis. I do have a folder system that I haven't updated in probably 10 years, so when emails didn't fit nicely into my current setup I also just let them sit.
Something else that contributed to my massive amounts of email was Unroll.me, a service that, in theory, is supposed to help with email overload. In reality, it created more of a mess in my inbox by "hiding" lots of emails in the Unroll.me folder. Between Unroll.me and letting emails pile up for the better part of 10 years (with some smaller cleanups here and there), things have gotten just a bit out of hand!
If you're curious how I got back down to 0, here are the general steps I followed to get from 30,000+ to 0 emails.
Ask yourself why you're doing this.
This is an important first step of any project that I take on. Not having a compelling why is a surefire way to set myself up for burnout. When it comes to email, I don't care about getting to inbox 0 as a goal in and of itself. What I do care about is not feeling frantic when I open up my inbox. Seeing the total slowly creep up every time I checked my email was not helping that frantic feeling. I knew that in order to address that feeling I had to do something with those 30,418 emails.
Decide which email address(es) you're focusing on.
I'm assuming you've got at least two accounts, perhaps a personal and a university email address? Decide which one(s) you'll focus on. I decided to just focus on my personal and blog emails, but left my university email alone since I'm currently on leave. Once work starts back up, I may follow this strategy again for that account.
Tailor your email deletion strategy to the amount of emails in your inbox.
Here are some strategies that worked for me.
Set a timer
This was a helpful strategy when I had thousands of emails to go through. It gave me a nice manageable container to approach my 10s of thousands of emails with. I set a timer for 15 minutes and called it quits once the timer was up. I repeated this process (almost) daily until I got down to about 1000 emails.
Tackle your email deletion on a consistent basis
I chose to work on this project for at least 5 out of 7 days a week. Really, I wanted to do it every day, but I also knew that once I told myself I was going to do it everyday I would feel pressure about doing the thing every day. So... I gave myself a little wiggle room which took the pressure off if I happened to miss a day.
Set a #s goal
This was a helpful strategy when I got to under 1000 emails. I'd aim for 100 emails in one sitting (or 15 minutes if that happened to come first). As the amount of emails in my inbox got smaller and smaller, the ones that were left were the ones that needed a bit more attention before deleting or filing away so it took a little longer to sift through them.
Use the search function
The search function is your best friend in this process. E.g., at one point I was getting 4 emails a day from Express (which is ridiculous). To find them all I used the search function to pull up all of the Express related emails in my inbox. This strategy worked well for promotional emails where I could search, select them all, and click delete... which was very satisfying. The search function also worked well for emails from family and friends. I could search for their specific email addresses and then file them away in their appropriate folder. Which brings me to the next point....
Use folders to organize any emails you want to keep.
Although I have a folder system, I wasn't actually using it much. I made a point to categorize anything I wanted to keep and then create new folders/tags if there were emails that didn't quite fit in any of my current categories.
Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, and unsubscribe some more
I unsubscribed from so. many. things. Truthfully, there are only a handful of email newsletters that I actually want to be on. They mainly consist of people I know or have worked with personally or people who have blogs that I read regularly. Unsubscribing from all the lists I've added myself to over the years has meant that I've drastically reduced the amount of emails coming in and in turn will have less that will accumulate in the future.
Try to resist going down the rabbit hole
Use the time you set aside for email deletion, organization, or adding tasks to your to do list only. I found that it was really easy to get off track during this process, heading off to random websites or to check out something I’d long forgotten about or look through old pictures. Keeping myself focused on deleting/unsubscribing or filing emails away, as well as adding new tasks to my to do list if necessary helped me stay on track (versus responding to emails or clicking through to a website, etc.)
Track your progress (or figure out what motivates you and do that!)
I love being able to visually see my progress. I used a little tracker bar in Notion to show how many messages I'd gone through. Once I got going, it was really satisfying to see the amount remaining get smaller and smaller. If tracking your progress doesn't motivate you, find something that does. Maybe you give yourself some sort of treat after your email session or if you hit your weekly goal or when you get down to 10K and 5K and 1K, etc.
Have a plan for email management after you've made it through your emails
The emails never stop, so it's important to figure out how you'll keep this going in the future. Will you spend time each day deleting, filing away, or adding tasks to your to do list if there's something that warrants a task list item? Or will you do this process a few times a week or once a week? Since I've gotten used to spending 15 minutes per day organizing my inbox, that's what I've continued to do. I don't need the full 15 minutes usually, but I'll spend 15 minutes going through whatever has come in and file it if needed, delete it, unsubscribe, or create a new to do if it warrants a response or other action.
What's next in my email deletion journey? I'd like to go through my current folders and organize them so that they make sense for my brain now. I set them up quite some time ago and how I like to organize things has changed, so I'll go through and update or add folders as needed.