Less is More || Reclaiming My Inbox

I'll admit it. I'm the type of person to enter my email into sites for their one time coupons and what not. It probably doesn't help that I have three four five email addresses (that I know of, I probably have more if I take a second to think about it). I have my yahoo which I use for my main email, my GMail which is my professional email (i.e. it's on my resume), I have the email address for my business Love-Lea, LLC,  I have a Comcast email whose sole purpose is to just exist simply for the sake of having Comcast as a tv and Internet service provider, and then I have my work email.

Not too bad right? Wrong.

Five email addresses means I have five times the opportunity to sign up for "exclusive" coupons for stores and merchandise and what not. True. But that also means all of those "exclusive" coupons and what not that I signed up for translate into the thorn in everyone's Internet presence side. Junk Mail.

And because I'm a self-proclaimed coupon queen, three of my inboxes have changed from having a specific purpose (for the business, for my professional life, for my family/friends) into one big clusterf... mess of junk mail.

Situation 1: I was in Peru for a week total. Meaning I hadn't checked my email in 7 days. Why did I touch down in Baltimore only to find that I had 300+ emails in my Yahoo! account, 50+ in my professional account, and 20+ in my business account? Clearly I must be more popular that I thought. Not.

95% of those emails were junk. Coupons from stores announcing their "Super Last Time We'll Ever Have Prices This Low For Real, For Real" Sale or daily deal sites, I'm looking at you Groupon, Living Social, Schwaggle, KGB Deals, BMore Bargains, MobStub, Google Deals, and SniqueAway. Funny Story? I was getting daily emails from all of those places, sometimes multiple per day depending on the cities I subscribed to. That totalled to about 15 emails per day just from those daily deal sites.

I realized that I was going a little cray cray just from deleted emails. So I did what I should have done a while ago. Every email that I found myself deleting without even reading, I simply hit 'Unsubscribe'. So hopefully within the 7-14 business days that it takes the computer to tell itself to stop sending me emails, I will have less clutter in my inboxes and more peace of mind. I'll also spend less on those impromptu purchases of a professional culinary knife set endorsed by a celebrity chef that is on sale for $29.99 plus free shipping. But that's another story for another time.

Moral of the story? When life gives you a bag of lemons for 70% off...hit Unsubscribe.