#7: The Life-Changing Magic of Decluttering Your Inbox
Shortcuts to get rid of email junk, babies make grown men goofy...and tequila.
It’s getting warmer outside and I got my first dose of the COVID vaccine last week so the summer’s looking up! And since I forgot to drink with you last time, let’s take a double shot of this Tequila Sunrise and get this inbox clearing party started. Woot!
So last time we covered the first step in getting control of your inbox - getting that backlog out of sight. (If you missed that, it’s here.)
The problem is, these emails might be gone from view but they’re still there…lurking beneath the surface, hogging up all your space. So now we need to clear that backlog, and I’m here to help you to speed up the process! All it takes is knowing what to search for.
Anything beyond 5 years ago.
..make that 7 if you run a business and need records for financial or legal reasons. Otherwise, get rid of it. Go to your Archives (or All Mail), search “before:2016” (or 2014), select all and delete.Anything with large images or attachments.
Fun fact - attachments take up a lot of space in your email.* And most of them are completely useless. Search “size:5MB” to find all the emails with large attachments and delete the ones you don’t need (if this turns up too many results, start at 10MB instead, you hoarder).*If you’re email provider is sending you warnings about running out of space, these are probably the guilty culprits.
Any email marketing from brands and social media.
Basically, anything that ends up in your Updates, Social and Promotions folders. You never read ‘em and you don’t need ‘em. Just go into these folders, select all and delete. If you feel like there might be a few important emails caught up in there, do a cursory review to move these to your Inbox before completing this step. (Next time, we’ll talk about unsubscribing so you never get these again.)
If your inbox is very old and you used to get a lot of nonsense emails from the same sender in the past (like admin updates from university or that stupid game you used to play at work when you’re bored), there’s a way to remove all those at once.
Go to All Mail or Archives, set the order parameter to Oldest first, then look through to find any past frequent senders you can identify.
When you find one, right click on that email and select “View all from sender”.
When the list of all the emails from that sender appears, select all and delete.
Whew!
When you’re done clearing out all you can, go to your Trash, select all and permanently delete them. Unless permanently deleted, emails in Trash still count towards your allotted storage.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but if you’re dealing with crazy overcrowding in your inbox, it will go a long way.
Next newsletter will be the last in this email series. I’ll be sharing exactly what to do to with new emails as they come in, so that it takes you less than 5 minutes to go through your emails each day.
OMG have you seen this?!
I find it ultra-hilarious to see how a bunch of grown men will go absolute bonkers trying to entertain babies. You go, girl! Shake what your pharmacy gave you!
PS. I went drinking with my friend last week and we were talking about life, business and her thoughts on this newsletter. Then it struck me that the convo we were having was the very reason I named it Grown Up Cocktails and it all came full circle for me. Thanks to all those who read and appreciate my words. It warms the cockles of this girl’s heart. ♥️