Hey everyone,
It's the middle of December, with Christmas rapidly approaching. There's not much left of 2025, and if you're like me, there's still a lot happening during the last couple of weeks in the year. To avoid overwhelming you with impossible time-consuming tasks, I'm sticking to some easier-than-usual ideas this month: quick resets for different digital areas. So far, we've covered your phone and your photos, and today we're looking at email.
I've spent a lot of time on email in the past, focusing many early newsletters and articles on the subject and devoting the first month of Tidy '24 to it. If you want something deeper than what you'll find below, try that Tidy '24 link. But for this week, here's a distilled version of some quick methods to give yourself a nice clean slate for the end of the year:
- The Nuclear Option (1-2 minutes):
Archive everything into a folder called "Archive 2025" or similar. This is a surprisingly effective method that feels like cheating but isn't--not really, anyway. All your email is still there. It's just not in your face anymore. You can still easily search it, browse through it, organize it later, or whatever you need. But the psychological weight is lifted. If you're honest with yourself, you probably weren't going to get to those 1,826 messages in your inbox anyway. (This is particularly helpful if you find your inbox building up over time; it's like a release valve on a pressure cooker.)
- Finish Your Deletions (1 minute):
Empty your trash and spam folders, if you've checked recently to make sure there aren't any false positives. As I mentioned before with the photo reset, this is optional. If you intentionally let your trash and spam folders empty themselves after 30 days (or however they're configured), there's no real requirement to clean them out manually. But if you want that extra-clean feel at the end of the year, go for it.
- Bulk Promotional Purge (5-10 minutes):
Search "unsubscribe" to surface all marketing emails at once (or check the "Promotions" tab in Gmail, if you use that). Then, select everything and delete it. Or, if that feels too drastic, delete any promotional content older than 30 days. There's a near-zero chance that any promotional messages older than 30 days are either relevant or useful, and since promotional messages tend to make up the vast majority of what we all receive, deleting them can make a huge difference with almost no effort.
- Draft Graveyard Cleanup (2-3 minutes):
Check your Drafts folder for abandoned emails you'll never actually send. Sometime these appear because we clicked the wrong button while jumping around our inbox, or we meant to write something but forgot to finish, or some topic just lost its relevance before we could prioritize an answer. In any case, this is usually a quick and easy area to check and clean up.
- Quick Unsubscribe Round (5-10 minutes):
Scroll through recent emails and unsubscribe from 5-10 things. This is less of a "reset" and more of a way to get ahead of the constant inflow of messages going into the new year. The end of December is a good time to allow yourself to re-prioritize a bit, to let go of subscriptions that turned out not to be as fun or interesting or beneficial as you thought. (Yes, even this Tidy Bytes newsletter! I'm not asking for special treatment.) If you find yourself habitually deleting messages from one or more senders without even reading them, that's a good sign that you could simply unsubscribe and save yourself the trouble. It's not very much trouble, I know, but it's the sneaky kind--if you don't stay on top of it, suddenly you'll have an extra 3-4 dozen messages to wade through next April. Multiply that by a dozen such pointless subscriptions, and suddenly it's a bigger problem.
You don't have to do all of these, but try picking two or three of them and see what kind of difference it makes in your inbox.
I mentioned above, check out the Tidy '24 posts if you want something deeper:
- Week 1 (Jan. 2nd): Archive Everything
- Week 2 (Jan. 9th): Unsubscribe Without Mercy
- Week 3 (Jan. 16th): Simplify Your Folders
- Week 4 (Jan. 23rd): Quick-Clean Routine
- Week 5 (Jan. 30th): Leverage Good Tools
In other news, I haven't forgotten my 2025 Consistency Challenge (migrating my mom's note-like Word documents into a real note tool), but holiday events and other projects have conspired to make it harder than expected to make progress. When a project like this depends on two people with wildly different schedules and not a ton of free time, that's just how things turn out. We're not giving up, but how far we actually get by the end of the month is still very much TBD.
I've also continued experimenting with different ideas for the local-AI Tidy Organizer tool, and I'm learning just how much I don't know about how such tools are built. I expect that I'll look back on this period of self-education and rough prototyping and feel the same way that I do when I watch my 8-year-old trying to accomplish something in GameMaker Studio: "A" for effort, but probably the hardest conceivable way to reach the goal. Still, it's fun and interesting, and it's the most realistic path for me to learn anything practical in the AI development space at this moment. I'd go through some actual coursework if I had oodles of free time, but...
That's all for today. If you make a dent in your digital mess with any of the email reset actions above, leave a comment and let me know how it went! Sharing wins is a great way to motivate yourself to further action.
Until next week, happy data-taming!