Digital Detox

I spend way too much time at my computer screen.  I'm probably not alone in that thought.

When I go away for a week I am almost scared to not look at my email account for fear of being overwhelmed when I come back.  And... what's worse is that I often don't want to read the emails and just hit delete...hit delete...hit delete through maybe 20 or 30 emails in a session.  Each one of those emails has a carbon footprint - and it is a carbon footprint that most of us probably don't even think about, like the carbon footprint of a Google search.

In so many aspects of my life, I'm making efforts to lower my carbon footprint.  I create almost no physical waste.  I put my dustbin out once a year, with rarely more than what would fit in an "old style" single use plastic carrier bag.  But my digital waste is horrendous.

So this year, I've decided to do something about it.  I'm having a digital detox and a good old tidy up of online life.

I have had a half hearted attempt at this before and unsubscribed from a few emails, but this time, I'm going to be far more thorough.

Instead of clicking on delete without reading an email, I'm catching myself with that thought process and making sure I do open the email and find the unsubscribe button.  With apologies to these retailers as it is nothing that they have done to wrong me, but I know that no amount of email from Next or Monsoon or Laura Ashley or any other lovely retail outfits is going to make me impulse buy clothes/homewares etc.

I have completely changed my shopping habits over recent years and I do impulse buy on occasion - but that is largely when I have five or ten minutes to spare between appointments and seek shelter in charity shops.  I have also been making attempts to make regular donations to charity shops and I am very free and easy with the impulse buys while I'm there.  But I'm not going to impulse buy because I see something on an email, so what is the point in allowing that email to arrive in my inbox.  I think that will probably cut down the number of emails I receive by around 25 percent if I keep up the thorough unsubscribing.

Yesterday I realised that lots of the email I have to delete my way through is from Twitter.  I use Twitter a fair bit.  I do like to catch up on the news that's really important to me - the environmental stuff - via Twitter.  I learn a lot from reading articles I click through to from like minded people that I follow.  But I don't need to know every time someone new follows me.  I do regularly find new information sources from new followers that I then choose to follow back as we clearly have common ground on Twitter, but I can do that on Twitter or Tweetdeck itself.  I am sometimes getting three separate notifications about things, one from the app on my phone, one by email and one on my computer.  So I took a look at the settings and had a think about what I really do find useful and I unchecked all the rest of the boxes.

Today, I have noticed that the only emails I received were things I really did need to know about.

For January, I'm going to content myself with monitoring my online life in order to continue the clean up of future incoming stuff.

Next month I'm hoping I'll find I have more time to do some pro-active cleaning up of emails that are still in my Inbox - all 3800 - of them.  It is not as if I don't have a comprehensive filing system for emails I need to keep.  I have that already - I just don't keep on top of it.  But with fewer emails coming in, maybe I'll manage that aspect of digital life better.

If anyone has any top tips and great digital clean up habits, please do let me know.