Digital Declutter: The Benefits of Having a Clean Personal Inbox and How to Get It

Digital declutter is almost like a mental clutter: you don’t necessary see it but it is there and it can make you uncomfortable.

In this topic, I will be elaborating more specifically about our personal emails - the email address inbox you tend to neglect because you're already so caught up on your corporate emails. Let's not forget that we work to make our lives better and more enjoyable out of work, we should not neglect that part of our lives.

Here are some benefits of having little or no unread messages:

• You check your emails more consistently - means you don't miss out on important dates or deals that you care about 
• Your call-to-action is much faster rather than sitting on it until you totally forget about the topic
•  You tend to check your spam email as well - this way, you don't miss out on important emails that tend to get stuck there

How to get to there (especially if you have 1000+ unread emails) - a process that worked for me:

1.  First, create a junk email account - this email account is like your digital junk box for all those one-time events that require you to indicate your email address. Better yet, don't bother providing an email if you don't care for that item/company/whatever it is that much 
2. Read/remove 10 - 20 emails everyday - I even had a habit tracker for this one 
3. In this process, as you open these emails: unsubscribe to all news letters that you don't care about, organise emails and determine if the sender is spam or not, reply immediately to emails that has a deal you want or a call to action 

You will take some time to clear your emails, especially if you do have aloooot of unread messages. But these small steps will allow you to eventually clear your emails. Bonus is that - rather than only doing this once a month or when there's too much clutter - this enables you to gain the habit of checking your emails often to maintain a clean inbox and stay on track with your personal life/ emails.

Have fun!