In an earlier post I mentioned email and the way we use it nowadays. Of course the tool is great and it works so much faster and more efficient than the traditional “snail mail”. However something so convenient also brings the challenge to maintain the right balance between convenience and overload. Newsletters are such an example: very convenient as they bring the news you are looking for in a fast and direct manner. But our interests shift often over time and so we subscribe to additional, different, newsletters. That’s the point where overload sticks it’s head around the corner. We need to maintain our newsletter subscriptions too!
Since I started to actively maintain my own newsletter subscriptions it has amazed me how often I need to conclude that a newsletter is no longer of my interest. I never realized I was subscribed to so many newsletters. It is since about 6 months that I take a serious look at the newsletters coming in and yet there are still every week a couple of newsletters that I discard. So when I can spare two minutes to take action I click the unsubscribe button for the ones no longer of my interest. There are always easy ways to find the information once you need it and that is often soon enough.
Somehow there seems to be a kind of process you will have to go through, in the beginning there are also the type of newsletters that you are subscribed to because you feel obliged to do so. Maybe because they are job related, someone in your management chain maintains them, or they are from a family member or friend. Even in that category is a bunch that you will probably never read. You will probably leave those alone for a while, you won’t read them but still you might in the beginning feel bad about unsubscribing those. That’s ok, just delete them to prevent them clogging up your inbox. It is in this category the ones are that I am unsubscribing now. Only in one case someone asked me personally why I unsubscribed and I explained that I am only maintaining newsletters that I have an actual need for and of course he understood.
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