When we think of clutter, it’s easy to focus only on what we can see. But there’s a different kind of clutter that can be just as distracting as visible clutter. For the month of September, we’ll turn our attention in the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge to digital clutter, starting this week with an email cleanup.

Cleaning up digital clutter will simplify your life and save you time. Those are two great reasons but have you ever thought about the environmental cost of digital clutter? I hadn’t given it much thought, either, until I read a great blog post by Caroline from Enviroline Blog. In her post 10 Ways to Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint, she pointed out the environmental impact of all those emails and digital files. So, this week’s decluttering exercise is a win-win for me and the environment. I love it!

What is the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge?

In this year-long journey, we’re tackling one task at a time with the goal of cleaning up and organizing our homes. If you’ve just joined us, no worries. You can jump right in with this week’s challenge. Just check out the first two posts in the series to download your free checklists.

• 52-Week Decluttering Challenge
• Week 1 – Easy Decluttering Checklist

You can get easy access to all previous weekly posts on the main Decluttering page.

Week 35 – Email cleanup

Last year, in the 31-Day Decluttering Challenge, I did an initial cleanup of my email, focusing on unsubscribing from email lists. After removing my email address from 39 different lists, I noticed an immediate difference in the amount of Inbox clutter.

This week, we’ll take things a step further by unsubscribing from more email lists, and also cleaning up email folders.

Let’s get started!

This week’s decluttering and organizing tips

Before we get to what I got rid of, here are my tips and learnings from week 35.

• Think before you subscribe! Before subscribing to an email list, think first about whether the emails you’ll receive from the list will be useful to you. If they don’t provide valuable information, or will just tempt you to overspend, don’t join the list.
• Unsubscribe from all emails that you regularly delete without reading.
• Think before you save! If you’re tempted to save an email for future reference, ask yourself if you will ever really look at it again. If it’s something like a receipt that you’ll need for a period of time, create a “Temporary” folder and put it there. If it’s an attachment you want to keep, save the attachment to your computer, or to the cloud, and delete the email.
• Clean up your email folders periodically. I had emails in my folders from over 10 years ago. I also had attachments of digital receipts that I had saved to my OneDrive, but I also kept the emails. Yikes! 

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What I got rid of

This turned out to be a far more productive decluttering exercise than I expected. At the start of the week, I thought I’d probably just clean up a few more email subscriptions. When I ventured into my email folders, I was surprised at what I found.

In total, I unsubscribed from 18 more email lists. I also deleted a whopping 1,215 emails from my folders. WOW – a long overdue task for sure! And I’m proud that this cleanup has significantly reduced the carbon footprint of my email.

So that’s week 35 done and my digital footprint is a lot smaller thanks to this exercise.  

If you have friends or family members who could benefit from a little less clutter in their lives, please share this post and spread the word!

How do you organize your emails? Tell us below.