Do you know how you’re probably signed up to all kinds of newsletters? Maybe some of them are ones you want to be on, or maybe some are things that you’ve gotten automatically added to after you bought something. Maybe some of them are just spam.
Whatever the reason, the odds are you’re on a lot of lists – and they’re a MAJOR time suck.
When thinking about your email inbox, if you’re like most people, it probably stresses you out. You may have countless emails that you have yet to respond to – which triggers feelings of guilt, overwhelm, anxiety…
Yet at the same time, even with all the stress around email, we STILL get a hit of dopamine (a pleasure chemical in your brain) every time we see a new email appear in our inbox.
So, let’s say you have your email client opened up in a tab in your browser.
Every time you get a new email, you get a surge of dopamine that makes you feel emotionally aroused and happier. It only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s enough to get most people to stop what they’re doing and see who the new email is from.
The problem with this is that it constantly derails you from focusing. I’ve heard different experts say it takes between 7 to 21 minutes to get your focus back after you get side-tracked by something. (There’s also endless research on why multitasking is bad for you, but that’s a whole new story.)
The other issue with email is that your emails can constantly create bright, shiny objects for you to look at. You might be focused on one thing, but then see a sale for something else, and end up heading to a new site.
As you know “Email is everyone else’s agenda for me.”
All this said – no matter how you look at it, email can create problems. Minimizing yours is a good thing.
So, when you sign up to Unroll.me, you sync it with your email provider. It will log into your account for you (you can find out all about the security here: https:// unroll.me/ faq/ security), and it will find every single email newsletter you’re subscribed to.
If you’re like most people, there are probably hundreds or thousands of lists that you’re subscribed to.
Every single list that you’re subscribed to will be presented to you in a list format, and you can quickly click a button for every newsletter you’d like to unsubscribe from. You see the lists, then you can just click “Unsubscribe” very quickly. You can unsubscribe from 100 + lists in the matter of minutes, and cut off things that you’re not even looking at normally anyway, but are just taking up your psychic energy.
The other thing you can do, if you don’t want to unsubscribe, is use their “daily rollup” service. With that, you choose certain subscriptions that you want to be rolled into one daily email.
Let’s say you want to be on 50 different newsletters. You can get all of them put into ONE daily rollup, sent to you at the same time every day. With the rollup, instead of getting 50 new emails per day, you just get one. There are a few best practices to make sure you get the most from Unroll.me:
There are a few best practices to make sure you get the most from Unroll.me:
- Put as many newsletters as possible into your daily rollup if you’re not willing to unsubscribe from them. The more newsletters in your rollup, the less times you’ll get interrupted.
- Know that this will show that your account is logging in from multiple locations. If you’re logged into gmail, there’s a section on the bottom right hand side that tells you how many people are logged into your account and from where. Be aware that Unroll.me will make it look like you have multiple people in your inbox, because it’s constantly logged in, scanning your inbox, and pulling any newsletters that are meant to go into the daily rollup.
- Know the security implications. All said, I consider Unroll to be pretty safe. They use authentication services whenever possible. But if you’d like to read their (short) section on security, you can do so right here: https:// unroll.me/ faq/ security
To get started using this service, just head over to Unroll.me.
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Source: Rofe, Rachel (2014-09-12). Websites That Make Life Easier
