Good thinking.
The single biggest key to improving work efficiency is managing your inbox with savage brutality. So why not unsubscribe from everything?
I’d bet automated email, whether its notifications, alerts, email drops or marketing, represents a significant percentage of your email.
It takes seconds to be snared into a lifetime of email. Pretty much every purchase and interaction on the internet will generate tens if not hundred of emails over the life of your supplier/customer journey.
Mostly it’s rubbish and, compounded together, takes time to manage – even if you’re simply “swiping to delete” – and can take up to 20% of your working week just to process!
As the next generation move into a post-email world, email is becoming less relevant. It’s early days, I’ll grant you, but as email races towards its 50th birthday (history) it remains largely unchanged, and largely not suitable for the next decade.
Email had a short reprieve a decade ago when the war on spam came to an end. It seemed that when email was liberated from porn, dodgy pharmacies and minor criminality it became useful again. Without an alternative messaging or notification platform, email clung on. Grimly continuing to infect our busy lives.
So it’s time to dump the crap and unsubscribe from everything that is not absolutely critical to your business and personal life. For important stuff there are far better communication and notification channels available (WhatsApp, Slack, iOS notifications, collaboration and co-working platforms spring to mind)
Notification and marketing email has become the new spam.
Usefully, most creators of this robotic email provide a simple “unsubscribe” function. It takes less than 10 seconds to liberate you from a suppliers list. Do you really need to see the latest EasyJet offers just because 5 years you booked a cheap return flight to Barcelona? Probably not. If you wanted to find a cheap flight to Barcelona again you’d start back on Google or a comparison site.
Ditch the email, and you can liberate hundreds of wasted hours per annum. Conservatively, you should be able to kill (at source) over 1,000 emails in 2017. And 2018. We promise it’s worth the few seconds for each email list.
