Sometimes I’ll go on an unsubscribing tear. It’ll happen around some fake holiday like Black Friday or Cyber Monday when even the laziest of marketers manage to pull together a DEALS DEALS DEALS email.

I’m sure we’ll all experienced this. Your inbox will fill up with marketing emails from companies you haven’t heard from in ages. Email overload sets in harder than it normally does. So unlike a normal day, where I might just archive a marketing email to be done with it, the overload pushes me into action and I start unsubscribing en masse. I almost can’t wait for another one to show up so I can get myself off that list.

No barricade is too high. I’ll reset my damn password to your app so I can log in and manually adjust my email preferences – a hoop jumping that normally makes my blood boil. 

But lately, I’ve extended this unsubscribing vigor throughout the year. My unsubscribing finger is a hair trigger.

The vigilance feels like it has paid off in that my inbox feels clean and full of only important and relevant things. It’s work, though. I probably unsubscribe from 2-4 things a day. That sounds unreal as I type it, but it’s true. I shop for things online. I buy tickets. I subscribe to services. I test stuff out. I end up on a lot of email lists and it requires constant scrubbing.

It’s like keeping a house clean, isn’t it? To really keep a house clean, you work at it constantly. You do the dishes and sink every day. You sweep up after yourself. You leave rooms a little cleaner than you found them. Then you do bigger cleaning jobs weekly and monthly. You don’t let it become completely filthy and become overwhelmed by the thought of cleaning at all.

You can start today. Unsubscribe from something. Even if you do one a day, you’ll see progress.

Unsubscribing is also a good baby step toward better email productivity in general. If you can’t be bothered to unsubscribe from junk, it’s likely going to be hard to get the rest of that house in order. If you can, you’re already building momentum.