It’s unbelievable the amount of clutter one can accumulate digitally, you read a nice blog post, you open up another article, oh, let’s subscribe to their newsletter, or the thousand articles you push to the “Read later” service of your choice, follow, join group, like, sounds familiar?
For me is almost daily. When I get interested in something I go nuts about it, I start reading, listening, watching every piece of content I can get my hands on, to absorb the most amount of information I can about that subject. (Youtube is an awesome learning tool)
If you’re like me your online social stack probably comprises majority of Email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (There are a bunch more other social networks and apps, but the majority will use any combination of these 4).
I have 3 emails, one personal and 2 for business, and when I subscribe to something I usually just do it on my personal inbox, this way my business inboxes are always well organised, but even those, you register for a web service account and BOOM, almost immediately you get a registration email, a week goes by, BAAMM another email, then all of the sudden your inbox is a mess again. It got to a point where I got sick every time I had to open my email, this had to stop, I had to tame my online life.
I opened an account at unroll.me and found out that I had more than 1000 subscriptions, DAMN! I unsubscribed and rolled almost all newsletters in just under 15 minutes but I found that some emails get through their filters and you still have to manually unsubscribe them.
Some newsletters are very easy to unsubscribe, right from the header on gmail, but there are a few companies that believe that placing a 6 step unsubscription process will be very pleasant to their subscribers (NO, I DON’T REMEMBER THE LOGIN CREDENTIALS I USED 2 YEARS AGO), well in those cases I just use Gmail’s SPAM FILTER , because is basically what their doing.
I’m still cleaning up my inboxes since this is not a 2 hour process, you’ll still get emails from time to time (not every company emails you every week) but now I’m enjoying more and more opening up my email and seeing content that I really enjoy reading about; one of my favourites is getting Quora Digest, very interesting questions and answers.
Facebook friends could be organised in these categories:
And If you don’t spend some time organising and cleaning up your facebook account from time to time, your feed will be a mess and the experience of using facebook will be dreadful. The most important question would be, what purpose you want for your facebook account?
For me is 3 things:
Based on these 3 things, I created a bunch of lists, just to keep everything well organized, it’s time consuming but worth it. Want to know what is happening with you family? One click and your feed changes, and in 30 seconds you have a scoop on the matter, easy.
For LinkedIn since I’m not a heavy user, I didn’t change much.
Twitter is one social media service that I use to use more often, but my follow list just grew to a point where it was no longer fun, I never used their “List” feature and just followed people, BIG MISTAKE!
Now I reduced my follows to about 200 and what an improvement, it’s fun again.
To do this I unfollowed almost every account, keeping only the few that REALLY interested me, and started creating lists of interests instead of just clicking Follow, this way my feed is nice and perfect.