IT TECH CORNER

What are your new year's resolutions? Why not start by cleaning out your email inbox? If you're like most people, you use your inbox as a place to store information about special events and save PDFs and image files. If you currently have 2000+ email messages, it may be overwhelming to even start deleting anything because you have so many. Here are some basic ways to approach the cleansing of your digital space.

1) It's old and you're not using it.

Start with the oldest messages in your inbox. Your email program, whether Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or whatever, has a way to sort your messages by date and show you the oldest ones. If it's been sitting in your inbox for a year or more, realistically speaking, it is not critical to your daily existence and you should consider deleting it immediately. If it is important to you in some way, you should copy the text to a document, either Word or Google Docs or your program of choice, and save it in an organized folder and file structure for future reflection. Do the same with any photos or attachments, just download them or transfer them to your cloud storage and be sure to name them something clear like "Jesse riding a motorcycle" (which would be truly remarkable) instead of 039272830.JPG.

2) It's an ad or spam

We get so many of these nowadays that they overwhelm our inbox and quickly establish a stronghold, preventing our brains from making decisions about what to keep and discard. Deleting emails that are clearly advertisements or spam should be a quick and painless way to free up some digital space and free your mind.

3) It's legit and important

These should be demanding your attention instead of falling into neglect, but it can still be challenging to get rid of important messages, usually because we know we have to respond or take some kind of action first. Send a reply, call the person, or commit to accomplishing the action needed in order to move past keeping the message. Delaying only allows other important emails to build a pile of "to do" that is not getting "to done."

Clearing out your inbox may take a lot of time, so start with a 20 minute power session and go from there. Commit to some basic habits of email organization so that 2024 will find you with a happier email inbox.