My email has gotten a bit out of control lately. I'm not talking about emails from real people, I rather enjoy those most of the time. I'm talking about all the detritus that websites send me.
Every morning, I awake to see several new emails on my phone. Some are from newsletters I stopped finding interesting a long time ago, some are 'new follower' updates from Twitter, some are marketing notifications from e-commerce sites, some are from the newborn photography studio I just happened to give my email address to when my son was born. The list goes on.
I can't think of a single email in recent memory that was worth reading as soon as I woke up. All I see is a list of items to "mark as read" rather than anything that makes me happy or gives me value. It's a time-suck.
Throughout the day I get even more of this crap, it's getting old, and I'm putting a stop to it. This morning, I've unsubscribed from at least 34 services and deleted almost 6,000 emails that had come from those places. I've turned off nearly all email notifications from services I still use (such as Twitter), and set up filtering rules for any services I don't remember the passwords to and thus can't change my subscription preferences.
From this point on, any email generated by websites ought to be informative or delightful. Anything not meeting that criteria is getting junked immediately.
It's no 'Inbox Zero' but perhaps I could call it 'Inbox Zen'.
