Facebook And The Great Inbox Clearout

March 26th 2008

Right, so I’ve gone and done it. I’ve sucked up (most of) my reservations and got myself a Facebook account (check out my profile and become a friend). Those reservations have not exactly been proved unfounded because after only 24 hours of being signed up, I’ve wasted more time than I want to on tweaking my profile, searching for people and deleting vast amounts of email notifications.

Like many things that take up more time than I want, I will no doubt look at ways of reigning Facebook in, but that’s for the future. Seeing as I talked about email etiquette on Monday, my immediate experience with Facebook has spurred me to mention a simple but highly effective tip for cutting back your emails: cancel subscriptions and turn off notifications!

Whenever you join a site or register a piece of software, there is often the option to receive a newsletter, get notified whenever someone leaves a message etc. Untick it all! You don’t need to get a notification every time somebody becomes your friend on Facebook, especially if you already view your profile on a regular basis. How many emails do you get that are unwelcome newsletters (Small Business UK who are you?) or automated messages (Wordpress, I don’t care whether I have a message in moderation!)?

There is no end of advice written about how to manage your email inbox and get it to empty. But here is a novel thought: what about actually dealing with the source of the problem, the amount of emails you get? My etiquette guide goes some way to addressing this, but a lot of it is down to the emailing habits of others and that won’t change overnight. Canceling those subscriptions is something you can do right now. Yes, sometimes it can be useful to get these emails (if you are subscribed to Organize IT for instance…) and a notification can be very handy if you don’t visit a site often, but most of the time they just clog up your inbox!

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