My last post advised you how to manage your emails better, but you’ll find them much easier to manage if you make sure you’re only having to organise emails that you actually want.

How to manage newsletters

When I look at other people’s email accounts I see they often have a lot of newsletters or social media updates popping into their inbox all day. This is incredibly unproductive because it always distracts them, the newsletter often just sits in their inbox forever or they always immediately delete it. And all three things are a pointless waste of time.

Unsubscribe?

I like to keep abreast of new developments myself so I subscribe to people that I feel give me valuable advice. The key word here valuable – if you constantly delete a newsletter halfway through reading it or even as soon as it arrives because you find it dull, unhelpful or unrelated to your interests then unsubscribe dammit!

Quite simple you’d think, but it’s amazing how many people delete a newsletter instead of taking less than 10 seconds to just unsubscribe. It’s only going to appear again  so it’s best to deal with it now. You may feel a bit guilty unsubscribing, but these people aren’t friends and they’re not going to track you down to demand why you’ve dumped them.

Choose your receiving account and who you subscribe to

You should ensure that the newsletter is arriving in the correct email account – if you’ve set up a new email address solely for newsletters then, when each one comes in, take a quick minute to change your subscription details to the new one. It can feel like a chore, but it doesn’t take long and once they’re all done you’ll be really happy you did.

Review your newsletters frequently – there are probably loads of experts that write newsletters in your field of interest, so select the ones that you like the most instead of subscribing to all of them. If you’re not going to read them then they’re a waste of everyone’s time.

Newsletters shouldn’t just sit in your inbox once you’ve read them either. Either go to the website and clip them into Evernote or delete them. It’s also good practice to have a ‘login and registration’ email folder to spare you the hassle of trying to retrieve your password if you forget it.