A while ago I was becoming increasingly disgusted by the volume of email I was getting. This is the email which is getting by Gmail filters and making it to my inbox not to mention all the junk mail which doesn’t get past the spam filters. Much of it is stuff that I at one time signed up for never realize that it would continue to flood my inbox and waste my time. As I found myself deleting every day or every week the same email from the same senders I started to contemplate that most extreme of actions to the email weary–starting over from scratch with a new email account. Just like God said “let’s start from scratch with a flood to ride the world of evil” I thought about starting from scratch to rid my inbox of the evil flood of email.
Great idea, but then I started to think about all the stuff I have linked to that email address that I would have to change. And what if I forgot to make the email change on one website or one login? That could be catastrophic! Probabably not, but you never know! But then I noticed a little thing that nearly all such emails seem to have at the bottom–the words “unsubscribe.” Could it be as easy as that? Just click that little word and I will magically cease to get the emails. I thought it must be a joke.
Surely a wary click on that word would lead to a labyrinth of websites which would result in more emails from the Chinese mob or Russian hackers (like those responsible for the Conficker virus) who might hack my Mac and steal my iTunes library.
But I tried it, and miracle of miracles it works most of the time. Sometimes a click on Unsubsribe takes you to a form where you are asked why you no longer what to receive their life changing emails. But it takes just a little time and prevents you from aving to deal with their unwanted email again. Other times just one click will make the emails go away with no further hassle. I little time spent in simplifying my inbox results in less distraction and time wasted.
We all have many things piling up in the inbox of life. We need to be as diligent to eliminate some of these attention stealers from our lives so that we can discern the important from the frivilous. I love tech, but let’s be honest so much of it is chasing rabbit trails (kind of like writing on a blog that no one will see!). But it steals our time and we spend time looking at stuff and thinking about stuff that we never would if it weren’t in our inbox, so to speak. So how about doing the same thing with life as I am doing with my inbox? Just little by little, systematically evaluating what gets our time and attention. And then hitting “Unsubscribe” on some of it. It may take a little more time and thought initially. But the reward could be a less cluttered life with fewer distractions. Sure, you might miss that crucial email alerting you to the latest greatest thing you could take advantage of. But if you don’t know about it, you won’t miss it. And I think that’s just as good . . . if not better!
Chris Higgins 