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A few weeks ago I spent time with an individual to implement our "24 and Out" email best practice. When we started there were several thousand emails in their inbox - at the end of the clean-up all that was left were the 12 that had arrived that morning.

What was interesting though, is that they had about 30 subscriptions to various news, groups, sites, stores, and services. Those subscriptions were the majority of the "junk" in their inbox.

I'm reminded of a client in a Fortune 200 company that felt severely overloaded with important emails. Turns out that he subscribed to an internal document repository that sent him an email any time anyone in the organization changed any of the thousands of documents in the repository.

In both cases, these people were not as much overwhelmed by relevant email as they were by "personal spam" that they had signed up for. Neither person spent time with that chaff and in both cases the overwhelming junk in their inbox was undoubtedly hiding important email.

So the question for this month is how much of your inbox is consumed by messages that you requested yet don't actually read? If it's many, taking the couple of minutes to unsubscribe will save endless clutter and time wasted looking through your inbox for what is important.

Last updated on December 17, 2009 by Den