Amy Heidbreder

The story of the exploding inbox is as common as humans with feet. For every new store you purchase from, there is yet another email list you’ve inadvertently subscribed to. Marketing emails and SMSs increasingly seem more an epidemic than something helpful. So noisy have become our inboxes that agencies have resorted to a machine gun methodology of peppering our emails with more and more sends in the hopes of cutting through the clutter and being seen atop the amassing pile of junk. My job only compounds my problem, where bearing the brunt of testing most of the organization’s technological releases, I’ve accumulated a war chest of test accounts, all subscribed to email. At one point I was receiving a daily email 52 times every morning. For larger email sends, I might see 134 of the same email blast hit my quickly filling inbox. If you want to know why I stopped updating my website, well there you go. I was drowning.

Our digital spaces are places too and all those emails are taking up actual room somewhere on a server farm in California or elsewhere. And with so much email, how is it possible to pick out what’s important? I found that my inbox just overwhelmed me. I wasn’t as responsive as I wanted to be, perpetually bogged down and always loosing something in that blackhole called email.

This year I resolved to do something about it. At the beginning of the year, I made a resolution to get to zero unread emails in my inbox. It was an ambitious goal considering the size of my infection totaled more than 90,000. I know my measly 90,000 pales in comparison to the 150, 200, 300,000 I’ve heard exist out there in the world, but still it was a lot, and by most people’s standards “too overwhelming to do something about.” I find though I’ve been conditioned to not be allowed to back down from something tedious or overwhelming; it might admittedly be an unhealthy problem and probably a conversation for another blog. 😉 I find myself frequently leading the charge into very detailed and tedious work others might find to be “too much.” On occasion I’ll see someone throw up a boundary and ask to break down a body of work into a fragment that’s more realistic or flat out say no, but the second I try and do it, I get the feeling I’m perceived as just being emotional, so I resort to bulldozing through work most simply do not want to do—something to unpack another blog.

One of my coworkers told me a story about not letting others talk you out of the truth you know. She knew for certain the birthday of a mutual coworker, but she was talking with a friend who was also seemingly certain of said coworker’s birthday, and both were certain it was on a different day. The teller of the story was correct on the date of our coworker’s birthday but the friend that was wrong was so convincing that the teller of the story doubted herself in that moment even though she had asked this coworker her birthday multiple times. Where am I going with this? I have been faced by some very stoic and convincing people regarding the workload I may see coming for a project. They tell me I have nothing to worry about, to the point I start to doubt reality and maybe start to also believe that I may just be “emotional.”

Again, back to my inbox and how this all ties together. My inbox had inadvertently become a black hole. I wasn’t as responsive as I wanted to be, and my Gmail was 99% full. Could it be me being overwhelmed was self-induced, that I let it get this way? As I got deeper into the war against my inbox, it almost felt like me clapping back, fighting to regain my personal space, and fighting for clarity. What this email project inadvertently became was a bit of healing and a detailed study of the history of many large projects where I work. I gained an arsenal of written documentation clearly justifying how I sometimes feel. It was so liberating, not only to have this clarity, but also to have the relief of seeing these emails read, filed, and gone.

A path to self-healing isn’t what sent me down this road. It was a coworker who noticed the number of unread emails I had when we were looking at something together on my phone. “Did that…did that say 80,000,” she inquired. Then we started asking others how many unread emails they had. It inspired me to go through a few—1000. Then another 1000. Then another. Then before I knew it, I had a goal. I realized my inbox had become this giant rock on my back. It’s so relieving to no longer have to carry it, and to also not have it be an excuse by which others might judge. I am officially starting from ground zero. Emerging from underneath this email pile feels liberating, like I shook some chains off.

I’ll leave with a few tips for digitally decluttering:

1. Set a daily goal that is realistic to you. My daily goal may not be realistic for some, but it was 1000 unread personal emails and 200 unread work emails a day.
2. Don’t think this is going to be gone in a day. It took me 4 months and up to 4 hours a day.
3. This is hard and tedious. You will just have to accept that fact.

Now go and get your digital life back!