Digital pollution is an actual thing. Do you have any idea about that? One of the forms is called dormant pollution which is the cause of the storage of emails. Every day we receive a lot of emails but only a few of them are necessary and a lot of them are junk emails. And what do we do with those junk? Nothing. We just let them sit in our inboxes for an eternity. We have heard of a lot of not-good-for-the-planet things lately but very few of us know that junk emails are one of them. One email emits 10g of CO2, which is the same carbon footprint of a standard plastic bag.

That is why I have decided to clear my inbox of any junk emails. Today. I have four different email addresses (both professional and personal) and I don’t how long it’s going to take but I made up my mind to get this done today. A clean inbox has a positive impact on both the planet and your life. So, let’s get on with it…

Today’s Task: Clearing Junk Emails

This is one in the series of the green planet challenge I’ve started a while ago. It’s been a great learning experience. Okay, let’s get started then.

First, I logged into my oldest Gmail account and directly headed to the spam folder. Emails that are longer than 30 days in the spam folder will be automatically discarded. There were 300 emails sitting in there waiting to be discarded. So, I first deleted them.

And there are 17,120 emails lying in my inbox that were gathered over the years. There are thousands of unread and unwanted emails. I started it somehow but looking at the figures now, I’m utterly confused about how to be done with this. I don’t know where to start so I first opened up the social tab (with about 6000 emails) and saw a number of notification emails from facebook, quora, and many other social media websites. Then I got an idea to turn off the email notifications from all social media channels.

Facebook email notification – Off

Quora – Off

Youtube – Off

Twitter – Off

Pinterest – Off

Etc…

And then deleted all the past notification emails. Now the social tab is empty.

Moving on to the other tabs one by one I realized it’s a heck lot of work to finish in one day. It takes days to clear out one email address let alone four. So, in the end, I kinda set a weekly schedule to clear junk emails and unsubscribe unwanted ones.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is, we can bring a lot of change with simple lifestyle habits. If we have the will to do something, we can do it. Decluttering your emails can have a positive impact on your work life and also life on the planet. So every week or whenever you can, take some time out and discard the junk in your inbox. It is too big of a task to finish it in one day, ergo I decided to allow this whole weekend to tidy up my inbox.

So… that’s it for today. What have you been up to lately? Would you be considering decluttering your email inbox for a better life? Let me know in the comments what do you think.

I’ll see you soon again.

Love,

Nikki.

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