Deleting emails is often a mundane task everyone dreads doing, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This article explores ways to make email deletion fun for your friends, family members, and coworkers.
This year, we want to encourage readers to celebrate e-Records Day (10/10) in style and throw your very own email deletion party. Email deletion is a lot like cleaning the dishes: a necessary evil. Just as the dishes won’t clean themselves, our inboxes won’t empty themselves. For many of us, we feel a sense of dread just looking at our inbox. The number of unread messages might be in the dozens, the hundreds, or in some cases even the thousands. The deeper we’re buried, the more daunting the challenge of digging ourselves out. So, where do we start and how do we make this terrible task more enjoyable?
You Start by Throwing a Party!
Your party doesn’t have to be anything fancy.
Maybe your party looks like booking a conference room at work and inviting your department to spend an hour hacking away at emails. Maybe your party looks like gathering your friends and family in your living room to cut down on the digital clutter. There’s no one-size-fits-all email deletion party, which gives you plenty of flexibility.
You’ll want to advertise your party. If you’re organizing your party for personal purposes, you may want to double-up on a pre-existing holiday where everyone will be gathered anyway. Then, you’ll set an hour aside in your holiday activities where the group sits down with their laptops, phones, and tablets and sets about deleting.
If you’re organizing your party for your workplace, you’ll want to pick a good day and time when most of your coworkers are available. You may want to:
- Create a pamphlet advertising the event
- Send calendar invites
- Make the party hybrid (virtual and in-person)
- Schedule it monthly
- Spend some office funds on snacks
Every party needs music, so compiling a playlist is a must. We recommend finding uplifting or exciting music to add some pizzaz and energy to the party. For increased engagement, you can open your playlist to your party attendees to make their own additions and recommendations.
Make sure you know your audience’s needs ahead of the party. Even if you think your audience is familiar with basic inbox functions, check in with attendees before the event. You want to make this party fun and educational for everyone. If a substantial subset of your prospective attendees isn’t sure how to delete messages, you may want to begin your party with a demonstration. That way, no one feels lost!
Finally, no good party is without a game. Start a friendly competition. See who can delete the largest percentage of their back-logged inbox. Invest in a small prize for the victor or grant them bragging rights or a monthly title like “Email Annihilator.” It may also be interesting to include other metrics, like oldest email deleted or weirdest spam email received.
A party is what you make of it!
Alena Darmel, “DJ performing live in a vibrant nightclub with an energetic crowd dancing under colorful lights,” Pexels, April 30, 2021.
How to Prioritize Email Deletion?
No one is interested in destroying all of their emails. Almost everyone has some important records stored in their inboxes or sent to them via email. Maybe you have bank statements, receipts, or correspondence you need to keep either to follow retention schedules or for personal reasons.
So, which emails should we target first?
We should always start with spam. Sure, many of us have spam filters that send spam emails directly to the trash—where they belong—but the filters don’t always catch everything. Keep an eye out for promotional emails, spam messages, and suspicious messages from companies and individuals you don’t know. These are the types of emails you can simply delete and forget about (and they’ll also boost your score if you’ve decided to compete in your email deletion party).
While we’re on the lookout for spam emails, we also want to ensure that we’re unsubscribing from emails and listservs we don’t need or want to receive anymore. We’ve all found ourselves signed up for spam emails without our knowledge. As you’re reviewing your emails for deletion, you can click the “unsubscribe” or “edit email preferences” links on trusted promotional messages to ensure the clutter you cut is gone for good. This could be yet another category on your competitive party leaderboard to foster good email habits in your party-goers.
Then, you’ll move on to trickier cases. Maybe you’ve signed up to receive emails for an organization’s newsletter or a job posting board. You may want to keep some of these for reference purposes. If that’s the case, we recommend you organize your inbox into well-named folders that are organized by topic and year. So, if you have a subscription to a newsletter, you can name your folder something like “2015_Newsletters”.
Tip 1: If you want to expand the scope of your deletion party, you can add bonus points for new folders created!
Tip 2: Once you have your folders in place, you can set up “rules” for your inbox to automatically send certain emails to specific folders.
If you work in state or local government, you’ll find many of the emails floating in your inbox are public records. This means they must be retained for a specific amount of time per the retention schedules. That might sound like it would put a damper on the deletion party, but the vast majority of your records have a short-term retention period, typically under 5 years. To keep your party running smoothly, focus on the most common records found in inboxes: fiscal (state government’s GS-102, local government’s GS-02) and administrative records (state government’s GS-101, local government’s GS-19).
Using inbox folders keeps your inbox clean and makes it easier to delete emails in the future. For example, once you’ve decided you no longer need your “2015_Newsletters” folder, you can delete the folder itself, which will delete its contents. That means you won’t have to worry about manual deletion, saving you time in the future!
After the Party
Once the party is over, be sure to connect with your guests. Ask them what went well and what could be improved for future parties.
Know your audience’s needs and have someone willing to help attendees.
Gustavo Fring, “Two colleagues working together on a computer in an office, focusing on a shared task,” Pexels, October 4, 2020.
If there was confusion over what a suspicious email looks like, you could begin the party with a brief presentation or a hand-out to help attendees. Additionally, you could assign a few individuals familiar with spam emails to assist attendees as needed.
The shape of your party will look different depending on the needs of your guests and the size of your group, but the end result should look the same: increased confidence in getting rid of old emails.
By deleting old or spam emails and organizing your inbox, you’ll make it easier to find the emails you need. With events increasingly sending emailed tickets that are delivered months in advance, it’s important to have a neat inbox. No one wants to be panicking in line, trying to find their tickets!
