I’ve changed email service providers. It’s for reasons I won’t bother getting into here, and I didn’t do it lightly, but it was something I felt I had to do.
I had expected that change to take some effort, but suffice to say, working to fully make the swap to the new service has been… let’s keep it moderately polite and just call it “an unexpected pain in the ass”.
Signing up was quick and easy. But then came the Letting Everyone Know part. And that’s been the pain. Because it’s not just a matter of getting in touch with family and friends about the email address change. That takes a bit of time to make sure everyone who matters to you knows, but isn’t much of an issue.
The real time suck is telling everyone else everywhere else.
It’s work.
It’s banks.
It’s the doctor and dentist and osteopath.
It’s the vet and dog trainer and dog sitters.
It’s every point-collecting store membership we have (quick math for you on that one: However many point programs you think you’ve joined, triple it and add another handful to be more accurate).
It’s everyone I need to get in touch with for my mother’s care, because I’m her power of attorney: Retirement home, her doctor, her dentist, her hygienist…)
It’s every site I get job leads from.
Every newsletter I subscribe to.
Every streaming service we subscribe to.
Every company I take courses from or order anything from or reserve anything for online (from writing courses to voiceover courses to the rockclimbing gym for the kid, to books to movies to flights).
It’s every aspect and department of the Toronto District School Board, because I’m preeeeetty sure that changing it just once in one place won’t cover the myriad departments I get communications from regarding the kiddo’s schooling and excursions and extracurricular stuff.
My… lord.
Once I’m sure I finally get everything I can switch to my new email address — once everything is showing up in my new inbox and nothing continues to show up in the old one — I’ll finally cancel the service I’m leaving behind.
But here was an unexpected twist: What I hadn’t considered was that there would be so much unread email in my old account.
I’m not talking dozens of emails. Not even hundreds.
It’s thousands.
Thousands.
Over 4200, in fact. It’s closer to 4300, really, but let’s not pick nits.
The quickest option to solve the issue is to bundle and export the emails to my laptop, then I can go through them and process them at my leisure.
(Leisure, he says, as if that’s what one does as a casual passtime. “I finally have a day off work and zero obligations. Whatever shall I do with all this free time? Why I know, I’ll go through 4200 emails.”)
So the issue isn’t a practical one as far as it slowing down my email switch. I can get all those unread emails away from my old address before cancelling the service.
It does, however, raise one very pertinent question: What the hell am I subscribed to, or getting emails from, that I can just be sitting on 4200 (ok, almost 4300, shut up) emails that seemingly aren’t important enough to have read in the first place?
Some will be relevant, of course. Some will be bank statements I didn’t click on the email for. Some will be old newsletters from writers or creative types who I actually want to read from but simply haven’t yet because I overlooked it or it got buried under other, newer email. Some will be from myself, emailing a story idea or haiku, etc., that I just wanted to have on a file somewhere for use later.
But surely that can’t account for all of those. Or even most of them. Let’s face it: Even if it’s fully a third of those unread emails that are relevant and useful — and I have a hard time picturing 1400 bank statements, newsletters, and bits of my own writing — the vast bulk of those emails are… well… not.
Which makes me wonder what that vast bulk even is.
What vectors of presumably recurring information have I signed up for that I evidently then sometimes totally ignore, in some cases probably for years, seemingly without any consequence?
And so, what digital clutter is contained in those thousands of emails that I can safely cut out of my life?
Unread emails are something of a burden for some folks, and I’m one of them. It’s not a particularly pressing issue, but when I log on and see that I have hundreds, nay thousands, of unread emails, there’s a tiny bit of stress added to my mind.
Ugh. Right. Those, I’ll think. I really should clear those up.
And then I don’t, of course, because you may have noticed that life has a sneaky way of constantly coming back to put other obligations and pressures on you and your time. You’ve got to prioritize, of course. And so stuff like shopping and cooking so your family can eat at a decent time naturally sits higher on the list of importance than, say, clearing out email.
Then later on, or the next day, or next week, you log into your email and… Ugh. Right. Those…
It’s a low key, background stress that keeps rolling through your days and weeks and months and years. And before you know it, sometimes through entire swaths of your life.
I’ve seen a couple of videos on how to achieve the sometimes lauded “Inbox Zero” state, where you have literally no unread emails waiting for your attention. I’m not such an absolutist that I need to get to that point — and there’s a bit of an unappealing chasing the horizon aspect to that, where you need to keep on top of it constantly, which isn’t something I’d wish on anyone — but I feel definite relief when I’ve at least made some adequate progress in knocking down a good portion of the remaining number of unread emails.
But what if I can just circumvent that from the get-go by removing myself from whatever lists I’m on that I don’t need to be, or want to be any longer?
To paraphrase the old saying, perhaps the best defence (in fighting an overwhelming number of unread messages in my inbox) is a good offence (in cutting out the needless influx of messages in the first place).
So yes, before I cancel my old email service, I plan to go through those unread emails by at least skimming them, to ensure I’m not deleting anything of value that I want to keep. But almost as importantly, to see what I can safely eliminate from receiving in the future to keep my inbox better managed and help free myself from needlessly spending time and attention and a tiny, recurring frustration on a collection of something that I can evidently live just fine without anyway.