Old Year’s Resolution

Plenty of time on Saturday for promising that we’ll get to the gym (and this time we really, Really, REALLY mean it!), watch less television, lose weight, blah, blah, blah.

For now, ending this year, here’s something that’s not really a resolution, but an excellent way to spend a half-hour tonight or tomorrow. You’ll thank me all of next year.

Go through your email and spend the time to hit the “unsubscribe” button on all of the daily and weekly crap that builds up in there.

If you’re anything like me, you buy something, blindly accept terms of service, or maybe even have a newsletter or something that you once actually used or found useful. But after buying one or two things, you haven’t bought anything further in months or years. You aren’t going to any of the concerts or plays from that band or that theater, and you don’t really need to know what that ticket broker has coming up every week. That place you donated to once is now bugging you every week (or more). That newsletter that was really good three years ago is now nothing but clickbait.

So now your inbox is filled with this junk and you either ignore it (and let your inbox fill up) or you just delete it en masse every day. It can be a pain to find the unsubscribe button, to deal with the little hassles they put you through to get them to stop, and it’s only a couple minutes a day to just delete them all. Plus, what if you block them and then you need to get something from them later. Unsubscribing = blocking, right?

Nope. You don’t have to block those senders and sites. In fact, you really don’t want to in many cases. You don’t want to block the airline that’s sending you those travel deals every day, because you do travel with them and you’ll need to see your ticket confirmation and updates. You don’t want to block that ticket agency because you will use them in the future and you don’t want your tickets going into your spam bin or junk mail folder.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to put up with their advertising and repeated appeals for donations.

In every one of those unwanted emails there’s an “unsubscribe” link. The good companies let you just hit it and be done. The pain in the ass companies make you jump through some hoops after they take you to their website and try to convince you to stick with them. Either way, use the unsubscribe button, and be vicious when you cull.

A few minutes a day? Yeah, and at 365 days a year that’s thirty or forty hours. Make the time and effort now, finish 2015 strong, and take back those thirty or forty hours.

You’re welcome.