Email can be a colossal time-suck. There is no nicer way of saying that still gets the point across. If you let it, email can take hours out of your day. Just reading emails, and deciding what action to take, is a very lengthy process when we’re talking about dozens or even hundreds of emails per day.
What can you do?
You can’t eliminate email completely, no matter how much you would like to. Leo, the genius behind Zen Habits, tried to completely eliminate email recently. While he’s far more of a minimalist than I am, he wasn’t able to go cold turkey on emails. That just goes to show how important email has become in today’s world. That doesn’t mean that you’re stuck wasting hours on your inbox every day, though. There are some steps that you can take to pare down your email time. Today’s step is very simple, and it’s a great way to get started. Are you paying attention:
Unsubscribe.
That’s right, unsubscribe. Do you get weekly newsletters from an internet marketer, newsletters that are pretty annoying, and borderline pushy, trying to sell you stuff you don’t want? Stop hitting delete every time you see it. Take a few seconds to unsubscribe instead.
Perhaps you get weekly ( or more often ) sales emails from Dillards, Sears, JC Penny, Best Buy, etc. I used to get tons of these emails. Never once did I find something that I simply had to purchase in these emails. Rather, they all went in the trash. That is, until I unsubscribed from them. If I want to buy a digital camera from Best Buy, I’ll visit their website or store. I don’t need a sales email to help me along.
By now you probably get the idea. There’s no need to get constant sales emails in your box. They are time wasters, and distractions that you don’t need. Unsubscribe from them, and banish them from your life. Don’t waste your time and thought on these; your time is far too valuable.
