Inbox Stress. Oy.

I receive a ridiculous amount of emails everyday. When I'm sitting at my desk all day and opening each email as it come in, it doesn't seem like much. When I'm sitting on the beach all the day and leave my Blackberry at the house, it's overwhelming.

I've never once ordered a single item from Bluefly. Do I really need daily emails from them? Do I need to be signed up for each and every newsletter NYMag publishes? Or Daily Candy? Or Food Network? When was the last time I printed a recipe (two weeks ago) and actually cooked it (um...)?

And that's just my personal email account. In addition to that, I have my work account, my Working Girl account and a super secret account. Yes, I have a super secret account. An account so secret that I forgot the password. Awesome.

The problem with me, my email accounts and all of the aforementioned emails is that nothing stresses me out more than having a number next to "Inbox." That number could be 3,434 or 3. It is so stressful to me. So every time an email pops up I have to open it.


Before I learned what archiving was I kept every single email. Talk about stressful. After over two years of working, I've finally developed a decent system for organizing my work emails. I still read them as soon as they come in but I do one of the following with each:

1. Delete
2. File
3. Respond and File
4. Keep in Inbox

The items in my inbox only remain there until I gather the information I need to respond. I typically try to accomplish this within a day or two.

Simple enough, right?

As simple as it is, it still took me nearly two hours to go through all my emails from vacation and I've yet to find a way to translate this to my personal accounts. I guess step one is to unsubscribe myself from all the newsletters I don't even read.