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You Should Get Newsletters Out of Your Inbox and Put Them Somewhere Where You’ll Actually Read Them — Here’s How
Medium has more than 100 million users. That means during any given week, millions of notifications are sent out to subscribers’ inboxes.
If you’re like me and subscribe to several different newsletters your inbox can fill up with reading material rather quickly.
While you might want to read all of the newsletters you’re subscribed to, there’s a chance you aren’t. According to Mailbird, 35% of emails are left unread.
With so many unread emails, your inbox fills up. It’s no wonder so many people lose track of important emails.
But the problem isn’t necessarily that you’re oversubscribed to newsletters. The problem is that you never actually learned how to use email in the first place.
This article is going to offer a solution to get newsletters you intend to read — especially your newsletters — out of your inbox and somewhere where you’ll actually read them.
Once you find a home for your newsletters and schedule time to read them, you’ll be able to spend more time engaging with content shared by your favorite writers.
Your email inbox should be a task manager, not a repository.
In his book A World Without Email, Cal Newport describes how email was adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. He looks at IBM as a case study for the adoption of email, writing:
“[IBM] chose to use email because it was a rational solution to the need for practical asynchronous communication in large offices.” (77)
Asynchronous communication was supposed to be a solution that would make knowledge workers more efficient. Instead, it did the opposite.
Email gave workers free reign to send all different types of information — meeting requests, agendas, feedback, and office wide announcements — to one another all at once. Rather than being a place to organize information for you to take action on, your inbox has become a massive repository of disparate data points.
Knowledge workers never learned how to process all of the information that finds its way into…
