Clean up email with unroll.me

Healthy digital habits can sometimes be just as important as healthy nutrition habits.  And although we are well aware of how we should be eating for our well-being, it certainly is not taught to us the best way to handle all the digital clutter we work with daily in regard to that necessary evil: email.

Next to our consistent social media checkins, email may be one of the most time consuming tasks that we can encounter in a day.  Yes there are emails we need to acknowledge and answer, but sometimes it feels impossible to find those emails when we’re sifting through a lot of other messages that could be valuable but we just don’t have time for right now.

So what happens? Well, I was a collector, thinking that at some point I would come back to the messages just hanging out in my inbox (which rarely happened) and over time, my email “waistline” (i.e. inbox) started getting larger and larger.  My numbers were well into 4 digits and only getting bigger by the day.  Some people are “deleters” and they just get rid of everything when it comes in to their world.  The drawback with this tendency is they may get rid of emails too quickly or spend time they don’t really have. Some people are “filers” and have a system where they only touch an email once to file and once to respond (if necessary).  This can be a great system, but if a filer is consistently getting emails (which we know happens), he or she may spend a lot more time than needed filing away email to only have to go back through them at a later time to respond.

Maybe you fall into one of the previous categories or are a hybrid version, in any event, if email is weighing on your days or a necessary evil, there may be a helpful tool out there that could help drastically limit the excessive email clutter that is running your schedule.  The answer may be found by using unroll.me.

Unroll.me works like this…you go to the website, create a log in and give it permission to check your email account.  It is looking for subscription based emails or anything from businesses.  After it generates a list of all of the subscriptions it finds, it lets you unsubscribe from the email (right there and then!), ignore (which means it will continue being delivered to your inbox regularly) or “add to rollup”.  Add to rollup means any time an email from this entity goes to your inbox, unroll.me will add it to your daily (or weekly) “Rollup”.  You will only receive your roll up when you designate it to come to your inbox.

For example, I rolled up all the emails I still want to receive and get one rollup delivered to me once a day.  The rollup contains all of the emails I would have received that day into one nice little packaged email.  I choose to get it at night, so that I can stay distraction free while at school.  If I want, I look at the email in the evening when I’m unwinding and have time to check in with everything all at once.  This system means that my inbox only shows more important items and then all the other stuff that may be interesting but not urgent gets sent at the end of my day to look at if I have time.  It’s awesome!

Besides it being completely convenient and free, one of the other great features is that unroll.me it’s always looking for pesky subscriptions to creep up into your inbox.  It will let you know that in the process of collecting your roll up, it found a few more subscriptions.  At this point, you can unsubscribe, continue receiving or add to roll up.  So this is an ongoing “clean up” of our email!

I started using this in August and it’s been such a wonderful tool to keep things more organized without me having to be in charge of figuring out a system.  I don’t doubt that this handy tool will save me hours of time and countless payback in lowering my stress throughout this school year.  So, if you are feeling like email is just one more thing that you would like to hire someone else to do, consider hiring unroll.me to take care of one part of your day so that you can spend your precious time doing work that matters!

If you have any other tips, tricks or resources for organizing email, please write it in the comment box below.  I would love to know what other things you are using to create some order in those hidden, but very chaotic parts of your day!