BUTTERFIELD I’d subscribe to chucking out all those pesky piles of junk emails

I’VE been embarking on a little project over the last few weeks. I’ve set myself the challenge of cutting down on the number of emails I receive, because it’s dawned on me how much of my day I lose to glancing at, and then binning, useless messages I’ll never read.

It’s a very cathartic process, a bit like a digital version of clearing out your clutter at home but, take it from me, it’s quite a challenge.

Between my work computer and my home computer I monitor five email inboxes. I’ve got two newsdesk inboxes for work, and then my own personal one. And I use two emails at home to keep certain things separate.

Across my three work inboxes alone I worked out once that I receive around 150 emails every day. And it’s quite a timeconsuming job to look after them all. It becomes an absolute nightmare when I get back from a holiday and find I’ve got the best part of 1,000 messages to sift through, too.

My main work inbox dates back at least 20 years, and whoever set it up before me was apparently quite trigger-happy with the things they signed up to.

By actively going through every email that comes in, I’ve noticed we’re getting emails from companies in America, Japan, Malaysia, and even Russia.

In most cases, binning these “subscriptions” is quite easy. Most emails have an “unsubscribe” link buried in some inconceivably small greyed-out text right at the bottom.

Click on the link, wait for a confirmation page to load, and you’ll never hear from them again. Marvellous.

But there are plenty of emails arriving every day which don’t offer this. Thankfully, our email client has a filtering option, so I can just direct them automatically to a junk folder – but I’ve found this can be hit and miss, and sometimes it’ll take a few attempts.

It’s taking a while, too. The other day I went out for a few hours and came back to 23 emails across the three inboxes, despite having unsubscribed to pretty much every message I’d had in the previous week. That was quite demoralising.

It does seem to be having a small effect, though. Especially with my own inboxes. I think it’s easy to forget how many of these subscriptions we sign up to, and thankfully they’re usually easy enough to get rid of.

It is quite a faff, and I do have better things to do, but by the time I’ve finished this little “project” I’ll be relishing in the joy of being able to walk around without my phone constantly pinging, and I can go away for a few days and not come back to a million emails to sift through when I clock on at work again. So I recommend it. Next time you dip into your emails, rather than swiping away the one that’s just arrived from a company you can’t give two hoots about any more, scroll down and unsubscribe. And then do it with the next email, and the one after that. Within a week or so you’ll have a lovely clear inbox. I can’t promise a digital oasis of calm – my emails are still a full-time job – but every little helps and all that.