Cleaning out the Inbox and the Mailbox

" You can't invent things like time, Violet said.  You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers.  You can invent things like steam-powered window washers.  But you can't invent more time."

-- Lemony Snicket

A New Year means being hit by the organization bug.   I decided I needed some strategies for taming the volume of stuff that just wastes time.

First huge time-drain - junk emails.   I get emails on three devices (cray-cray, I know) and while I've synched two to eliminate duplicates, I still spend  waste too much time deleting emails I never even open.   Since the first rule of organizing clutter, even e-clutter, is to stem the influx,  I attacked my email and ruthlessly hit that "unsubscribe me" option! 

Next on the chopping block was the updates from some of my online art groups - the ones on which I like to "lurk" but not participate.  I know how to access these  groups if I want to check on something, but I don't need daily updates.

(Here)

Then, on to snail  mail. We must be on the master-list for catalog mailings!  It takes a few minutes, but I tracked down customer service on several and unsubscribed from the paper catalogs.  Check out this site:  https://www.catalogchoice.org/  to unsubscribe from catalogs, junk mail, and be-still-my-heart, PHONE BOOKS.  We get several huge phone books a year and believe me, I have enough phone book pages for altered art to last a life-time!  Who even uses a phone book anymore??  I love that Tech Zombies lists phone books as "a technology that doesn't know it's dead".  Then there  are the these frightening numbers: 615 MILLION phone books printed last year, accounting for up to 30% of trash.  Can't you just see archeologists several hundred years from now wondering what those strange yellow layers  found in their dig  represent?  Another "unsubscribe me, please".

( Jim Krasinski has nothing to do with this post, but he's just so cute!)

Finally, cleaning up Facebook.  Confession - I've unsubscribed from nearly every application so I only get real news from my FB friends- no game updates, no info about sites visited, no nothing but actual status updates and pictures. 

So what am I doing with all my extra time now?  Pinning things on Pinterest, of course!