Time to hit unsubscribe

I have been going through many changes in my digital life lately. I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter from my phone. I still have Instagram on my daily carry device, but only because that is where friends and family post their images.

I haven’t deleted any accounts, but I have been tempted. The truth is, these services do provide some value, and I find it difficult to completely remove them from my life.

Today, however, I am working on a different issue, and that is dealing with all the email lists I have hit subscribe to.

Over the years things come into your life, or you sign up for an account and they want to subscribe you to a list. What can that hurt? One more piece of email in my inbox. No big deal!

After years, maybe even a decade of doing this, it is a big deal. My inbox this morning only had 11 new emails from two accounts. To be fair I was up until midnight moving to a new email client, so I was caught up before I went to bed.

What I saw this morning was a frustration. I had one email that had value to me, and the rest were email lists that I never look at.

Time to hit unsubscribe. I went through each email, and hit unsubscribe. Be careful with this. I notice that some companies will cleverly allow you to unsubscribe to one list, while subscribing you to another, so take your time, and read carefully.

I believe that Googles tabs in Gmail allow this to get out of control. It is very easy to allow all the stuff I don’t care about to get sorted by Gmail, and just simply never look at those tabs. My new email client “eM Client” however brings everything front and center.

eM Client is a Windows only client, and it has great reviews. I am trying to find a more efficient email client than the web based versions that all the big companies want us to use. Gmail has made major improvements on their design and I really like it, but I am looking for an application that is separate from my web browser. I’ll let you know what I think about eM Client after spending some time with it. I am also playing with BlueMail on my Pixel XL.

As my wife and I go through a house purging, it is time to clean up my digital life, and unsubscribing is another way to reduce the clutter in my life.