Yesterday I shared my Fast & Furious method of cleaning out an overflowing inbox. Today I’ll share my more thorough method.

Deep Cleaning – This is actually my favorite way to declutter my inbox. It does take more time, but it’s far more thorough and it has an added bonus. I actually UNSUBSCRIBE from the numerous lists that I don’t care to be on any longer. This will make for a much lighter inbox going forward. Even if I use the first method because my old, not used much, email account has maybe 9,000+ messages (just a hypothetical number, of course!), I will still use part of the Deep Cleaning method to get myself off of those ubiquitous lists.

For this method, I look at the sender of the first message in my list. Let’s say it’s Unicorns R Us (a fictitious company, as far as I know). Maybe I signed up with them earlier this year because my friend’s daughter was having a unicorn-themed birthday and I could get a 50% off coupon for my first (and only, it turns out) order. But somehow, I never got around to UNsubscribing. So I type in “Unicorns R Us” in the search bar and it brings up 37 messages (they send more than one a week!) which I have conveniently skipped over every time I peruse my email.

I click on the first one, scroll to the bottom to locate the unsubscribe option, and click it. If there are further steps in the process, I jump through those hoops, and boom – I’m unsubscribed. I click the back arrow and it returns me to my list of 37 messages. I select them all and delete them. Done and done.

Now I go to the next message. It’s from Goulet Pens (who I love, btw). I search out all of their messages and there are about a dozen. I don’t want to unsubscribe, because I love them after all. I scan the messages and notice that one of them is for an order I placed a couple of days ago. So I still select all the messages, but then I uncheck that particular message so that I can keep it until my order arrives. But I go ahead and delete the rest.

I continue this process through my entire inbox. Yes, it’s a bit time-consuming. Sometimes I have to do it in a couple of chunks. However, I have knocked out THOUSANDS of email messages in a few hours without just blindly deleting everything.

Once I’ve gotten everything cleaned up from the above process, I deal with the few messages that are still left. Sometimes they just need to be filed (according to my own personal system), archived, responded to, or read and deleted. Usually I’ll find that I have fewer than 4-5 messages, if not ZERO. This is such a wonderful feeling, plus it’s much easier to maintain because I’ve gotten off of so many lists.

I’m sure there are other methods out there, but this is what has worked for me for a number of years now. Let me know if you try it, what you think, or if you have a different, yet fantastic method of decluttering your inbox.

Here we are – January 31st – and I’ve actually achieved my water goal every day (well, most of one day) this month. I started out very small. I decided that a small, achievable goal was better than a big one that I’d likely bail on within a week or so. Turns out that was a good line of thinking.

My goal?

8 ounces a day.

Not very much when you look at how much water I should have in a day. But that’s okay. Considering how much I don’t care to drink water, I figured even 8 ounces a day was a big improvement. I also knew there’d be days when I likely would have more. Plus it’s January in Colorado. Not exactly water-drinking weather for me. The only way I actually like water is if I’m super hot and thirsty and the water is super cold and icy. So I decided that the goal would be to add 4 ounces each month and by the end of the year, I’d be in a decent place.

I was hitting my 8 ounce a day goal every day and often getting more. By the middle of the month, I upped my goal to 16 ounces. Which I’ve been getting…and then some.

there’s supposed to be a picture here of my tracker, but for whatever reason, neither WordPress nor Flickr is cooperating, so there is no image. insert sad face.

My Inkwell Press planner has a tracker page for each month, which has been a help, too. Seeing those little hexagons getting filled in is a bit encouraging, especially to now see an entire month. Yeah, I know, the 17th shows only half, but I’m pretty sure I got all my water in that day. I just don’t recall, as we were driving home from Kansas City that day and I may have come up a bit short.

The cool thing is that I never set a goal of drinking less soda. I just assumed that if I didn’t buy it to have at home and I drank more water, less soda would be a natural byproduct. And I was right. Oh, I still have soda when I’m out, but I’m drinking so much less than I used to. It’s a move in the right direction.

I’m already surpassing March’s water goal, so who knows where I might be by the end of the year?

How’s that for a catchy title? Reached right out and grabbed you, I’m sure.

So that Photo-A-Day thing in December? Yeah, not sure what happened there. I did take some more pictures, but getting them off the card, onto the computer, edited, saved, and posted? Not so much. But I guess I have some material for future use, right?

Well, Happy New Year! A week into two thousand and seventeen. I’ve had a bunch of different blog post ideas, but they seem to be like the pictures – captured in my head, but lost between there and the posting. Actually, I’m pretty sure they’re still around – just like the pictures – and will pop back up somewhere along the way.

On a happy note, I’ve actually achieved my water drinking goal for the first seven days of this year! Even more surprising, since I’ve been sick since Monday night. I don’t care for the taste (or lack, thereof) of water and it’s even worse when my taste buds are on the fritz. But I did it. I signed up for Cathy Zielske’s FIT 2017 class (again) and the FB group has been a good support and encouragement. And my Inkwell Press planner has a cute little tracker in it, which is helpful. It’s also colorful when I actually accomplish the things I want to track. While I may need to cut back on soda, my thinking is that if I increase my water intake, that will automatically decrease the soda. We’ll see if my thinking is on track or just a bit wacky.

Christmas brought some fun pen and paper supplies for me. I got a purple Pilot Metropolitan Retro Pop fountain pen that I just love, along with some ink samples (Goulet Pens rocks!) and a bottle of J. Herbin Emerald of Chivor ink. This stuff is SO gorgeous and amazing. It’s a teal green, but when there’s enough ink on the paper, you can see gold glitter and even a magenta-red sheen. It’s just beautiful. It looks different depending on what you use to write. In the picture below, I used a dip pen with a fairly fine nib. I don’t think you can see all the colors, but I’m sure I’ll be posting more images.

In the meantime, I’ve been sampling other inks (hmmm…have to find that photo) in the Metropolitan. This pen writes like a dream and is quite reasonably priced.

I got some other goodies as well, but will save them for another post.

What Christmas gift(s) made your heart sing?

Time for some ZZZZZs. Still recovering from the cold and I have an early morning tomorrow.

December, second snow of the year, and we still have tons of apples high up in our trees. And on the ground.