Journaling 30-day-trial, Day 1

January 30th, 2008 by Bill Perry in 30-day-trials, Personal Development, journaling

This is my entry for Day 1 of my 30-day trial for Journaling.

Here is today’s Journal entry:

Well, yes, this is the first day of my Journaling 30-day trial. I had decided to start today, rather than waiting until the 1st of February, simply to go forward with the momentum I have right now. I was afraid that if I waited the extra days until the 1st, I wouldn’t have the same momentum.

So, anyway. for the past few days, up to yesterday, I’d been tweaking my Gmail account so that emails I get won’t just congest in the inbox.

The first thing I did was unsubscribe to all the mailing lists I’ve been subscribed to. I was previously subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists having to do with Internet Marketing, and other topics, but Internet Marketing was the majority of them. I had subbed to these lists so that I could see how different marketers handle their customer lists. It turned out that I got tired of getting so many emails all the time, and as a result I went “blind” to them all, and just stopped reading them and let them pile up.

So, between those emails and regular emails, I had over 9000 emails in my Gmail inbox, and over 7000 of those were unread.

So, what I did was set up another Gmail account, and used POP3 access to migrate all those emails over to the new account.
Then I went through all the emails, and any of them that had an “Unsubscribe” link in the email, I unsubbed from, then deleted all the emails from that particular list and/or sender.

After much weeding of emails and lists, I got it down to approximately 1000 emails I wanted to keep, either to archive, or because it would talk too much time to process at that time, basically stuff that I can keep or read/decide later on.

Then I went back to my original Gmail account and set up “filters”, which are basically like what message “rules” in Outlook do.
I set up what Gmail calls “Labels” for each type of email I want to archive and be able to get easily.

Now, it’s set up so when an email comes in that matches a filter, it gets archived and tagged with that filter’s matching label.
In Gmail, to “archive” means to simply skip the inbox.
So, now instead of filing through the inbox, I can just look at the list of labels, and see what sorts of emails came in, so I can decide and prioritize when to read each kind of email, based on time on hand.

So, now, if an email shows up in the inbox, it’s either spam that didn’t hit Gmail’s spam filter, or a list I haven’t unsubbed from yet, or other sorts of emails to sort on a case-by-case basis.

I feel like an immense amount of pressure has been lifted from my shoulders. It’s only been since 2 days ago that I got this new system set up, and I already have lots more time to spend on other things.

I LOVE IT!!!