Squeaky Clean Inbox

I logged into my email yesterday and realized that in the few days I haven’t checked my email¹, my inbox had become a downright mess. I had email notifications from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and daily deal-type emails from Groupon and LivingSocial and Travelzoo mixed in with emails from school, internship/work, friends, and family! It took me longer than I wanted to spend to sort out the state of my inbox, as I had a limited amount of time on the computer and I knew there were one or two urgent personal emails I needed to reply to.

I’ve been lazier than usual when it comes to keeping on top of my email in the last year, mainly because it’s a bitch and a half to get onto Gmail in China (especially since the whole Jasmine Revolution business). But now that I’m almost Stateside and am trying to coordinate my life in general, it’s time for me to update and actually use filters and labels and other nifty organization tools that Gmail provides.

I now have my email categorized into the following labels:

• Blog
• Daily deals
• Internship
• School
• Social media
• Work

“Daily deals” consists of emails from Groupon, LivingSocial, Sephora Insider, etc and automatically gets archived. If I have some time during the day, I’ll take a look and see if there are any deals I want to snag. If not, no big deal. I can also routinely delete these emails, as once the deadline for the deal has passed I’ll never need the email again and it will just take up space in my archives. “Social media” is for all of the notifications I get from my social media accounts, namely Twitter and Facebook. “Blog,” “Internship,” “School,” and “Work” are all pretty self-explanatory, although I imagine I’ll need to add a sub-label “Graduation” under “School” when spring semester rolls around!

Next step is to delete five year old fanlisting-related emails that I will never need again to clear up some space in my archives… why did I even save these emails in the first place?!

Also, to my fellow Americans: Happy Fourth of July!

1. Prior to arriving in Beijing on the 2nd I was in Xi’an, and my hotel there had no Internet. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.