I was recently reading a blog post from Leslie Shreve, of Productive Day.com http://productiveday.com/ about E-Hoarding.
As a virtual business owner, I’m always trying to find new ways to keep myself organized and to tame the various forms of clutter that I seem to collect.
And while I am admittedly a collector of many things that I probably don’t need (my husband would laugh at that one!) one of the things I actually do have good control over is my email. I have a system in place to keep my email clean and clear, and although I still probably have more ‘on file’ than many people, I am confident that my system works for me.
What do I do? First, I use my email correspondence with my clients as a means of check and balance for what I have done for them in any given month. So each month I file all of the sent and received messages in their folder. I keep those for 60 days – just in case we need to go back to find anything. Anything over 60 days gets deleted (of course any documents or important information gets saved to a shared folder in Dropbox as necessary if we need access to it). It’s an easy cycle each month and it feels great to delete thousands of email each month.
For my non-client email, I recently removed most of my ‘Message Rules’ – I had set up a system to filter messages when they came in. I found that I wasn’t looking at the filtered messages, and ended up collecting what I didn’t need. So now everything except client email goes right to my inbox, and I am forced to look at it – read it, keep it or delete it. It’s working well for me also, and I can also see at a glance whether I need to unsubscribe to something if it’s not serving me.
As for other e-collection, I have also gotten quite a hold on this. I used to subscribe to lots of free stuff with the intention of using it one day (been there too?). Now I am much more selective about what I subscribe to because guess what … someone will always be able to provide a report about productivity, or Facebook changes or tips about something that I am interested in. I don’t have to collect them all now, and neither do you. 🙂
If you are an e-hoarder, I’d love to hear what you collect and why you think you need it. I’ve been there, I get it – and though I still have a lot of things I probably don’t need (insert husband’s LOL here), I know that I am monitoring it all the time, and I’m much better than I used to be!
Hello, my name is Janet and I am an e-hoarder and addicted to free e-books!
Tracey – this post made me realize that their is a name for my disease, lol. I thought I was doing a good thing when I set up all those rules for my RSS feeds, e-newsletters and other subscriptions that I have but now, I’m going to remove them all. You are right, I haven’t looked at any of those “special” folders for months!
As for my e-book addiction, I have a folder, right on my desktop named e-books and I must add 1-2 free ones each day. I only print them out if they pertain to something I am currently working on and then I read them and keep them in a file. I will try to change this habit to only saving/printing the ones that are current to me, (I never look at what is in that file! :p)
Thanks for hitting on this topic – I’m sure changing my ways will save me time and energy in the long run.
Haha too funny Janet! I thought I was doing a great thing to stay organized too but I just found that I was collecting way more stuff than I ever read. I have to admit that I still collect ebooks but I put them on my Kobo now so I actually do read them. And if I don’t want to keep them after I’ve read them, I can delete them from there! Thanks for sharing!
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