Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling a little bit on anxiety coming from you because many of you are overwhelmed
by email.
Well, that is what we are here to work on.
Ask DottoTech is the show where you ask, I answer and you have told me that email is
a pain in the butt.
Let’s deal with that today on Ask DottoTech.
One of the things that I am acutely aware of is the pressure that’s brought onto all
of us by email overload.
We sometimes just get inundated by the amount of email that comes in and if we let it get
ahead of us, it can cause all sorts of pressure that we really don’t need.
Well, today on Ask DottoTech we received just such a letter.
It’s from one of our subscribers to our newsletters named John who says, “Not for
the first time I've been told that I'm nearing my 15 GB email limit with Gmail.
The last time this happened, I was on a deadline from hell and ended up temporarily starting
a new Gmail account and using that with the intention of returning to the original site
to delete the emails when I had time.
That was years ago and now I have two email accounts that are full.”
John, thou art an email hoarder.
That’s the problem.
You don’t know how to delete email.
Consequently, you filled up two 15 GB allotments with Gmail.
Don’t feel bad.
I know you do feel bad but don’t feel bad.
I know you feel stressed.
I'm going to show you a couple of ways right now that you can basically stay ahead of your
Gmail.
But before we do that, before we even consider ways to stay ahead, we have to figure out
ways to catch up.
How do you clear out all of that email in order to have some space?
I don’t think you should create a new account.
Let’s not do that.
Now you did mention here that it’s just too much for you to delete emails.
He said, “For example, I selected a Groupon email in the search and I highlighted it but
when I pressed Delete, it only worked 50 emails at a time.”
Ah, common problem.
Let’s start there.
Let’s start with deleting email.
Now I have what to me is an inordinate amount of email.
I've got a couple of hundred emails and maybe a thousand in my inbox but this isn’t an
unusual situation for many of you.
Many of you have ten times this amount of email sitting there, waiting for you and mocking
you.
So let’s begin with mass deletion of emails.
The first thing we’re going to do is free up space but every time we free up a little
bit of space, remove these emails, we’re also removing a little bit of pressure.
We’re also taking a little bit of pressure away from us.
So if I want to, I'm in Gmail here, if I just want to delete all of these emails on this
page at once because they are in my Update tab, I don’t really need them, they are
old and frankly I'm never going to get to them.
So I go Select and I go to Delete.
If I just hit delete now, if I just delete these emails by clicking on the Trash, these
50 messages will go.
But if I just look to the right-hand side here—this is what a lot of people miss—all
351 messages in Updates will be deleted if I select that.
So instead of just deleting 50 at a time, you can delete all that are whatever search
criteria you have.
Now when you delete them, you’re only mostly deleting them.
You’re not completely deleting them.
What’s happened is they’ve actually been moved to Trash so they’re still counting
against my Gmail account, against my amount of storage that I have.
You can see that I've used up about 7% of my 15 GB.
So after we’ve gone through and we’ve deleted all of the email that you want to
delete, John, then you need to go into your trash bin.
Usually, you’ll get to it by clicking on the More settings because a lot of us have
a lot of different categories in our email.
Go to Trash and when you open the Trash, you can delete all the trash by clicking in Empty
trash now.
That’s going to free up even more space.
While we are here, if you have spam filters turned on which we should all have turned
on, let’s not leave this until we delete all of our spam as well.
Now our spam filter is something that you should actually pay a little bit more attention
as well because of the odd time something valuable actually gets caught in the spam.
If I go into my spam filter, what I do is I will typically just scroll down looking
at the names on the left-hand side, seeing if there’s anything that actually might
be legitimate email.
I don’t see anything at all.
I very seldom find anything but the odd time you find something—nope, nothing at all
there—so I'm going to delete all my spam messages now.
I'm going to click Delete and they’re all being deleted as well.
So there I've just cleared up some space.
Now if I go through this process and go through and clean up my old messages this way, far
more effectively than just doing it 50 at a time, then you should start to see a real
change.
Actually, we see it, that I've actually cleared up about 3% space just by deleting my spam
messages and those other messages.
Now as well as that, as well as looking for the low-hanging fruit, the easy-to-find messages,
you can also find repeating messages.
You mentioned the Groupon messages.
If they aren’t categorized into an area that’s easy to delete, you can also pick
similar emails.
Let me see.
I've got a series.
I've been getting a lot of email because of something that I've set up with Twitter.
Let me just find the example.
Here it is – did you log into Twitter from somewhere new?
So this is Twitter actually checking me because I've got a couple of automated services that
are working with Twitter.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy that title and I'm going to paste
that title into my search.
Now when I search, look at what I got?
I got all of those messages that I would have to go through and manually delete.
So you can do this from an address From or To or a subject line.
If you’ve got a lot of email in that space, you can quickly delete it all just by selecting
it all here.
Once again, select all the messages with this search and delete it.
Of course, we’ll want to empty our trash bin as well afterwards.
So now we’ve moved all of those messages into the trash so you are now continuing to
clean up space as we go.
Now with a lot of these sorts of things where you’ve got repeating messages that you really
don’t care about, you’re going to want to go through and basically unsubscribe from
newsletters.
There’s a tool called unroll.me which we’ve talked about in the past.
I’ll probably do a video on it in the future but it combines all of your newsletters and
helps you to unsubscribe.
But it sounds to me in a case like John’s, that he’s got a lot of newsletters that
he has signed up for and unsubscribed from very few.
So you’re going to want to make sure you go through and unsubscribe.
It’s going to be a process but each step that you do is going to get you a little bit
closer to success.
Here is the reason that we want to stay ahead of this email and reduce the amount coming
in.
It’s because email overload creates a unique type of pressure on us.
When you have a full inbox and you’ve got email that’s kind of what we call below
the fold, when you’ve got more than say a single page of email to deal with, what
happens is you know that that email is there.
Even when you close the email down, your brain because it doesn’t trust that you’re going
to find something that’s on the second and third page tries to remember and it creates
something that they call an open loop.
All that it means is that you try and remember with this wet ware here what’s happening
in the hardware there or in the software there.
So instead of being able to relax and say I've got it, I've got everything under control,
your brain says I have to remind to Steve that he’s got that email on page two that
he should deal with and it creates stress.
A lot of the stress that we have in the workplace comes from this email situation because typically
in email, we have responsibilities, obligations, we’re going to be letting somebody down
or we’ve got opportunities that we’re missing so we feel obliged to do these things
with these open loops and that stress becomes very real.
So personally, I think that one of the biggest things that we can do to reduce our stress
load is stay on top of email.
The way you stay on top of email is by having what we call inbox zero, which effectively
means that you don’t have any emails that are unaddressed, that you have kind of white
space at the bottom of your inbox.
When you do, it is a wonderful feeling.
Now there are a lot of techniques.
If you do some search on inbox zero, you’re going to find lots of techniques.
We’ve got a free tutorial on our site about inbox zero but the essence of it is once you
get ahead of it by doing the different techniques that I'm talking about here, once you get
ahead of it then you want to touch it once.
When email comes in, you’ll want to deal with it immediately.
We’ve shown you tools like Boomerang and other ones that help with that but you want
to reach that goal.
You want to kind of attach a goal to yourself of only touching an email once.
When you open it, deal with it.
Get it out.
Either trash it, reply to it, send it to somebody who’s going to deal with it and basically
defer the responsibility to somebody else but you want to take an action on every single
email.
That way, you stay ahead of it.
I've got obviously some catching up to do but it won’t take me long because this is
more for show than for real.
The last tool that I want to show you is another one called Find Big Mail.
Now this one here is a tool that will go through and this deals specifically with the issue
that John was having with having too much email in his account.
What this will do is it will go through, and it could take several hours—I'm just showing
you the basic set-up here; it’s a free service although they like you to donate if you find
it valuable—your email and they find all of the large attachments so that you can delete
those large attachments, again saving you space.
All of these different tools combined are going to come together and help you deal with
your email overload problem if you have the case of John.
But John, I got to tell you hoarding email is the same kind of problem as hoarding in
real life, as people that hoard in their home.
It’s something that you have to get ahead of, you have to get into the mindset of deleting
email, getting rid of it and not worrying about losing it or you’re going to constantly
be dealing with this every couple of years.
You’re going to be dealing with the stress of having to catch up.
Plus, you’ve got the issue of having lost all of this content in opportunity that’s
buried in your email that you will never find again.
If we take a look at here, find Big Mail has just completed.
It has found my 20 largest emails with between 15 and 34 MB in attachments.
So I can actually go here and I can take a look at what emails have my largest attachments
and I can clear up a massive amount of space just by dealing with these emails.
Isn’t that awesome?
So those are the tips that we have.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
Usually on this show, we answer more than a single question but this single question
probably requires more than a single show to even answer because email overload is such
a big issue.
Now there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
Second is subscribe to our newsletter.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!