It worked. And only after a month. My email inbox is basically empty. There’s a list of read mails that require a follow-up at some point. But the important ones are marked, organized, labeled and filtered. And the rest is automatically handled by Gmail (if it’s spam or not important), sometimes with the help of a few filters. Unsubscribing also worked great.
tl;dr When I posted in January that I suggest that people take the time to review repeat-subscription emails and change the behaviour on how to deal with email. This post is to let you know it has worked for me.
Using some filters and labels I was able to quickly gather, organise, delete or unsubscribe from tedious emails. It became a lot clearer what was a real newsletter and what was just spam.
The result after being strict on how I handle email has paid off. It’s been basically a month and I now wake up to an almost empty inbox. There are a few left-overs. Some mails are an ongoing thing, others require a later date follow up. Social contact is now done via live messaging services, important things show at the top, and the rest just goes to the archive. A quick review shows it’s all stuff I just need to archive but requires no follow up, nor my attention.
Hopefully you’ve found some time to figure out how you can best approach your inbox and made some progress as well. I will have a bit more time in the mornings and afternoon that I can focus on other things instead.