If you are like me, you have a lot of newsletter emails clogging up your inbox.
And Monday mornings can feel overwhelming when you open up the Inbox of Doom!!!
But why do we actually subscribe to so many newsletters in the first place?
- Is it the fear of putting ourselves out there?
- The fear we think we’re not good enough compared to others?
- Is it the fear of missing out, so commonplace it has its own acronym, FoMO?
Or are we choosing to not risk enough, when we may in fact succeed.
IS FEAR HOLDING YOU BACK?
Like many self-starters, I tend to subscribe to any newsletter that seems vaguely interesting, then find my inbox cluttered with dozens of ads and promos for programs I’ll never buy!
Because while you and I are signing up, saving, filing and reading everyone else’s stuff, guess what. We’re not doing the essential work. We’re not shipping. We’re not setting ourselves up for the potential disappointment that our shiny idea may not fly.
Know that you will always find the info you need, so question whether you should really subscribe in the first place.
I have FoMO and use it as a way to procrastinate, spending time on social media when I should be working… I’m not a fan of being judged, of perhaps failing. I’m even scared of succeeding at times because of the pressure of having to do it again.
But I know that as long as my inbox is full of subscription newsletters instead of actual work emails or orders, my business is not moving forward.
UNROLL.ME
SO… If you do nothing else, install Unroll.me on your computer.
It lets you unsubscribe with one click: after you sign up to Unroll.me, you will see a list of all your subscription emails. With ONE click unsubscribe instantly from whatever you don’t want. Next, you can combine ALL your newsletters in ONE daily digest, the Rollup.
And you choose when in the day this digest email lands in your slimmed down inbox. I chose the end of the day so I would not be distracted first thing in the morning…
OTHER TIPS
If you want to get off the newsletter train, here are a few tricks for you to try:
- Only sign up for another newsletter after you have unsubscribed from 2 other ones.
- Create a new Gmail address and use it for your subscriptions so they don’t flood your work inbox. You’ll then need to log in to see those newsletters, it’s likely you’ll often skip this.
- If you just want the download offered by a website (we’ve all done it), unsubscribe as soon as you have it. Don’t wait for the flood of emails that will follow.
- Use habit stacking to unsubscribe: habit stacking is attaching a new behaviour to something you already do every day. So at the end of the day, when you are ready to pack up, schedule 1 or 2 minutes to unsubscribe from newsletters. If you are short of time, build up to it gradually, just unsubscribe from 1 on the first day, 2 on the second day etc, until at the end of the week you have unsubscribed from 15 newsletters. Aaaaand repeat. 🙂
Now put that Monday Motivation into action and go do some work 😉