Unsubscribe and other time savers
January 31, 2010
The best button in the world is unsubscribe. Every time we walk out our doors, watch TV, listen to the radio, or surf the internet we are bomb-barded with advertising. Over the last year I’ve engaged in a mission of unsubscribing. This means every time I get a newsletter or facebook notification I click the unsubscribe button in an attempt to eliminate the bombarding of my inbox. Some websites make this awfully tricky but it is worth it to save your inbox, and allow time to do things you really want to do, instead of constantly clicking delete to stuff you will never read. This also meant sending emails to friends or family who send me jokes I never read.
A common thought that comes to mind when considering to receive them or not is not wanting to miss out. So this is where you can be selective. As an example you can select what notifications you receive from facebook, and not have to put up them all. Websites that send out news up-dates on newsletters always have the same information on their web pages so using google reader you can get the information you need, all in one place. Google reader is a fantastic time saver. It is a website content “collector” where you can add any website, and it will tell you when the page has been up-dated. That means you can log into google reader, have a quick glance at the menu of websites you have listed and see which web
sites have been up-dated, instead of having to click, and load each of your favourite blogs or websites one at a time (pictured).
My unsubscribe mission was a success. If I do not check my emails for a few days I might have 10 emails at the most, instead of 40 or 50 that was common. It serves my less than 20 rul
e as well. Leo Babuata talks about processing your inbox to empty to limit wasted time, because our inbox’s commonly serve as our things to do list, and it is easy to consistently troll through them every time we check out emails, and re-read emails we don’t actually need to. It’s a brilliant rule. I keep emails I need to, filing them in appropriate folders, and always keep my inbox to less than 20 emails both at work and at home.
One of my favourite time savers on my mac is spotlight (pictured). Instead of having to open an application, or troll through folders to find a document, I just search for the title in spotlight and click on it, and that feature is available right from my desktop.
I keep my desktop completely clean, as again, just like a full inbox it is easy to keep opening these documents to see what they are, forget, and repeat the exercise a few weeks later. These are just a few things I do to simplify my daily interactions with my computer to limit the time spent on it, and keep more time free for other hobbies.
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