Breaking The Shackles Of Email Slavery

By Author: Rohan Leo
Total Articles: 13
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I never really considered myself a slave to my inbox… The lies I would tell myself and the amount of time it consumed was actually ridiculous. Of course I never really realized this before because of the inner dialog I would have with myself… You know the kind… “Save that email for later when you not so busy…” or “It might be important one day”, or, “You are so “busy” right now, no time to deal with it, save it for later.” or “That subsciber list would be handy, will read it everyday, I must sign up.” And so forth and so forth… I am not saying that the lists I was signing up to didn’t have valuable information… I just wasn’t opening them anymore. It probably had to do with the fact I was getting so many emails and had so many other things I needed to get done, I was getting overwhelmed and in turn started feeling that information overload paralysis thing going on, and there was guilt forming because I was aimlessly spending so much time in my email trying to get a grip on it.

I actually never started with the intent of clearing out my mail box, It all started with my search for a Virtual ...
... Assistant. Because of everything that was on my plate with growing an online business, starting a mobile app business while working as a cameraman and video editor, I decided I needed help, and besides, there were things I didn’t want to do anymore or that was taking up too much time and not making me any money. I didn’t want to work in my businesses anymore… I wanted to work on them. So one day, I was going through Chris Duckers blog (http://www.chrisducker.com) getting advice about working with VA’s and what kind of tasks to hand over to them. One obviously is email management and filtering and I thought awesome!! My email woes are over and I was about to make major advancements in breaking my addiction. The first thing I needed to do was go through my inbox and make sure I didn’t have any sensitive information I didn’t want sharing. Email can be a very private thing and just handing it over to a stranger is quite a scary thought. So off I went on my email clearing mission

It took me about 2 or so days to sit, with focus and go through my inbox(s) deleting, unsubscribing and archiving emails starting with the oldest first. I have been on inbox clearing sprees before… This time however was on another level. By the time I got about 1000 emails down I noticed something very interesting… Instead of selecting the emails I wanted to keep. I would select all then un-select the emails I wanted to keep and mass delete whatever remained. I could physically feel my mind relaxing, feeling a weight lift off me with ever time I clicked delete… The more I went the easier it became to delete, I became more honest with myself as well, I think it was the manotiany of my task, the reality I finally admitted to myself, I was never going to miss about 90% of the emails in my inbox. It eventually became a struggle for me to justify not deleting everything… Bar the very very important ones of course (which landed up in my archive folder and out of sight), everything else… gone!!! It is quite liberating in itself watching an inbox go from almost 7000 emails to a few 100 is quite liberating in itself

Right now as of writing this article. I sit with 0 emails in my inbox. I would also like to point out that I have about 6 or so other email accounts that I would check on a daily basis except for 1 which I use for reverse marketing strategies, so those emails build and then I do a mass delete once a week without reading a single one. Between all of my mail accounts I sit no longer than 1 hour a day dealing with my mail, I confess I have help with a few gmail plugins and tools which help me tremedously in maintaining my inbox now and a very awesome tip from Chris Ducker in managing email. (Stay tuned for the next post when I share what the tools I don’t ever see me living without are, and that awesome tip.

This new freedom that I have is awesome, and even though I still feel my email checking addiction, which is starting to get less and less, seeing that everytime I log in to see if I have mail… There is nothing that really takes up time now so I am in and out in seconds. I actually feel a bit of email loneliness when I log in to often so I let the time pass between log-ins in order to “feel more important” with more email…haha. The real funny thing is… I found it WAY easier to stop smoking than controlling my email log-in frequency…