My usual idea of spring cleaning comes from memories of my mother. She’d go through the house with the intensity of a military commander scouting out dirt in every corner. However, I recently experienced a different kind of cleaning on my computer.
It all began during lessons with my blogging coach. She noticed how difficult it was to locate my documents or pictures. The maze of locations for these items made preparing blogs much harder than necessary. Her solution came with a suggestion to spend time organizing my computer.
We spent hours tracking down various documents in whatever hiding place I had put them. It wasn’t intentional on my part but out of my techno ignorance. I had done a thorough job of creating chaos. My patient coach helped me to create a thing of organized and uniform beauty.
I noticed a disturbing fact at home while admiring our accomplishments. My collection of unread emails numbered over 3,000! Emails are a little like clothes hangers or rabbits, which seem to multiply beyond belief, whenever you turn your back.
I could have just blanket-deleted them but, horror of horrors, I might miss something important! I found myself nearly blind, or certainly cross-eyed, after a long evening of deleting emails, one by one. Out of the 3,000 I found two of them.
My email crisis is over but how did I keep from repeating this debacle? I knew I needed to figure out how to unsubscribe from a lot of unwanted emails. With any item purchased, especially online, I committed myself to a weekly or even daily email supply. They advertised sales, showed the latest products and made sure they weren’t forgotten. Heaven help me if I contributed to a cause, especially a political party! They no doubt would haunt me till the day I died and then hang around for the survivors.
Some of these outfits were especially tricky about unsubscribing. The print was so small it was unclear if the checked item even indicated a desire to stop. One of them actually said, “Nah, I was just kidding. Continue to send.” I couldn’t believe it!
My husband does not have this issue. In fact, his problem is quite the reverse. I would call him a cut-throat deleter. I asked him on our way to his medical appointment, “What’s the address for your appointment?”
“Oh, I’ll look . . .. Uh, sorry, I deleted it.”
Or another time I asked him, “Honey, could you email me that picture of my girlfriend and me that you copied from Facebook? I don’t have one.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. It’s gone.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of email. How else would I kept track of relatives who don’t communicate any other way? I doubt if some of them are even familiar with the concept of letters or cards. Not that I’m much better. I do so appreciate my daughter’s faithful supply of pictures via email to keep us in touch with the activities of her children. Their location’s three-hour time difference made emails and texting our best means to connect.
I highly recommend this light-as-air feeling I have as I maneuver around in my spring-cleaned computer. It’s almost like the new car feeling I get after a car wash. It doesn’t cost a cent and the hours spent will be made up in time saved later on. Please join me in forming an Email and Computer Declutter Anonymous.
Dianna
Sharing the Fruit of Maturity
Photo Credit: Creative Commons via Microsoft Word images