On a scale of 1-10 how many of you are at 11 if this is your phone?
On a scale of 1-10 how many of you are on 11 if this is your partner’s phone?
Don’t worry, Dr. G-Harris has your cure.
Technically, we all have this disease. The fear of deleting emails “in case” we might need them. Some of us have gone through a spiritual cleansing and been able to reach an Inbox Mentality. We can assure you, the level of relief you have on a daily basis is amazing. You actually feel “accomplished” each day.
Interestingly, this has become one of my most popular lessons for during sales training. This works for Gmail. If you have something else, Google it 🙂
A quick note before you say, “I really want to do this, but what if I need them?!!?”
In Gmail
When you do this bulk delete of emails, they will actually stay in your trash folder for 30 days and you can still search them.
If you think you should be saving something longer than 30 days, sorry, you’re beyond my skillset of help.
So there are two parts of solving this problem one is the immediate need, the other is the long tail play.
- Immediate Need – Get rid of the stuff in my inbox.
- Bulk Unsubscribe – Trust me, you aren’t missing anything.
- Simple Ongoing
Yes, feel free to share with your spouse, partner, family, and friends. Don’t share with your enemies, let them keep stressing.
IMMEDIATE NEED
You can delete THOUSANDS (50k, 100k) emails from Gmail in 90 seconds. Yes, it’s legit.
Step 1: Go to inbox and in the mail search bar type – is:unread
Step 2: Instead of seeing 1-50 messages on the right it will now show 1-XX,XXX
Step 3: Click the Select All Box on the left
Step 4: You will see All 100 conversations on this page are selected. AND then you will see “Select all conversations that match this search”
Step 5: Click that one of course
Step 6″ Click the Trash Can
Step 7: Google will ask “Are you sure” (don’t worry, you will be glad)
Step 8: Click Yes
Step 9: Rejoice
What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.
BULK UNSUBSCRIBE & SANEBOX
Several services exist out there, Unroll.me is one of my favorites. They send you a list a few times a week of all the emails you are subscribed to, then you can choose the ones to unsubscribe straight from them.
Here’s the interesting thing. Many of these services are free because they can see your data and turn around and sell the meta-data (NOT YOUR SPECIFIC PERSONAL DATA).
Now don’t freak out.
If you are subscribed to that many email lists that you have 10,000+ unopened emails I have news for you.
- Your data is already out there.
- You have no idea if Macy’s is selling your data or not. There’s a good chance they are.
- Ever wonder how all the magazines still show up in the mail, even though you never purchased something from them? Its because the retailers are selling data, and the companies are doing research with publicly accessible information.
So I say stop worrying about it.
My other favorite tool is called Sanebox, I’ve been using it for years and it saves me hours per day. No joke, hours.
They go into your inbox and can determine which emails are important vs not important. They simpy move all the non-important emails to a single folder, called SANEBOX. You can go in and quickly scan what you want, delete, etc.
Another cool feature: If something gets into your SANEBOX and you want it in your inbox, simply drag it over, and the system will remember moving forward. If something gets into your inbox that shouldn’t be there, but you don’t want to delete it, move it to your SANEBOX, and it will forever remember.
ONGOING MAINTENANCE
- Be mindful of the email subscriptions you sign up for.
- Click the spam button on unsolicited emails. Don’t feel guilty about it. I am sure the service who emailed you doesn’t feel guilty one bit.
So there you have it, you can now sleep easier at night because you don’t have the thousands of emails staring at you on the homescreen of your phone.
Let us know what you use to solve this problem in the comments below!
