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Email Clean-Up
It’s been over a year since I spent the necessary time going through my own genealogical spring clean, thanks to the help of The Genealogy Guys Blog, and I find myself needing a definite reset again this month. For the past year, I’ve been working on a research project, and items were merely tossed to the side on my desk, emails have piled up, and my computer has become a ridiculous mess of bookmarked sites and downloaded files.
So here I am, hitting the reset button over the next few weeks while I prepare to restart my genealogy education.
The first step is to start cleaning out my email and I have this designated as a regular task on my Google calendar, “50 emails”. To be fair, just because it’s on my calendar, doesn’t mean it always gets done each month, but the reminder helps. Its a simple task, just delete 50 emails out of your inbox.
The easiest way for me to do this, especially as a gmail user, was to select to view my oldest emails, and then begin scanning them for what may still be relevant or what had slipped through to be lost in time and buried with each new message that comes through (if you received the email more than a year ago, there’s a good chance you will no longer need it). It’s a very brief task that can be done in 5 minutes over the course of a weekend, a week, a month…however long it takes to bring your email down to a manageable amount.
note: my own personal email is also my “genealogy-related email” account, so I have a fairly good amount of personal items in there that are not related to genealogy, so I can hit DELETE with a fair amount of confidence. This is what works best for me, at this time, and sharing in the hopes it might work for others.
Happy Reset!