Unsubscribing to Emails
As an astute observer of behavior and habits that we all have, I one day took note of a habit I had unknowingly developed. Deleting unwanted emails.
Emailing is something that can easily get out of control beneath our cognition as had happened to me. I turned off the annoying alert that would seem to go off on my phone each time a new email would arrive. I had developed a Pavlovian response to check it even if I didn't want to. Next, I decided to only check my emails twice a day, once in the late am and once mid evening because I as I would routinely check my emails I noticed I was doing more deleting than reading and I wanted to consolidate the effort. Instead of being proactive in my behavior I resigned to sit through extended email deleting sessions twice a day. Three times a day until I could condition myself to twice daily. I found that I was deleting somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty emails a day. I am not a business person and email is not a huge medium of communication for me so I can honestly write that 98.5 percent of these emails were not necessary. I decided to one by one unsubscribe to each and every one of the senders. I am some what OCD when it comes to maintaining my inbox. To my horror it took me an hour and a half one morning to unsubscribe to the majority of these emails. They don't make it easy. Those unsubscribe links are are frequently hidden and clicking on them takes you to a site where you then have to again search for the links to unsubscribe. One sender had the audacity to require a written request to be mailed to be removed from the email list.
Suffice to say I accomplished my mission and to get five emails daily that I genuinely want is such a mental relief. I had let a behavior get out of control that turned into a habit I definitely didn't want. One can only wonder the amount of time wasted over these last months I had spent doing nothing but checking and deleting emails. Whew!
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
Emailing is something that can easily get out of control beneath our cognition as had happened to me. I turned off the annoying alert that would seem to go off on my phone each time a new email would arrive. I had developed a Pavlovian response to check it even if I didn't want to. Next, I decided to only check my emails twice a day, once in the late am and once mid evening because I as I would routinely check my emails I noticed I was doing more deleting than reading and I wanted to consolidate the effort. Instead of being proactive in my behavior I resigned to sit through extended email deleting sessions twice a day. Three times a day until I could condition myself to twice daily. I found that I was deleting somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty emails a day. I am not a business person and email is not a huge medium of communication for me so I can honestly write that 98.5 percent of these emails were not necessary. I decided to one by one unsubscribe to each and every one of the senders. I am some what OCD when it comes to maintaining my inbox. To my horror it took me an hour and a half one morning to unsubscribe to the majority of these emails. They don't make it easy. Those unsubscribe links are are frequently hidden and clicking on them takes you to a site where you then have to again search for the links to unsubscribe. One sender had the audacity to require a written request to be mailed to be removed from the email list.
Suffice to say I accomplished my mission and to get five emails daily that I genuinely want is such a mental relief. I had let a behavior get out of control that turned into a habit I definitely didn't want. One can only wonder the amount of time wasted over these last months I had spent doing nothing but checking and deleting emails. Whew!
#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset
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