The challenge with email
One of the observations I have made around how people interact with technology has come from seeing how they interact with their email.
My friend for example, was complaining to me recently that she has come to feel obligated to open her email in the morning and midday simply to get rid of the constant barrage of unwanted email that comes into her inbox each day.
How did she come to feel obligated to do this? Why is she not doing something to change her system?
Upon deeper investigation, I found out that she thought it was a hopeless cause. She has invested time and energy into this particular email account and has had it for nearly 20 years. She figured her account information has been shared so many times over after signing up for various offers that it would take forever to unsubscribe from all the unwanted email barraging her each day.
So, she found a way to cope.
What does this say about us?
Now, if she is indicative of any portion of the human population who has email, we are certainly not on the right track as far as having sustainable technology practices. Imagine, if some or all of us have similar experiences with our email, a basic technological tool for personal and business communications, how must our experiences be with our websites, social media platforms, etc.
The Ecology of Technology is a movement that tells us it doesn't need to be this way. We do not need to feel out of control when it comes to our use of technology.
How can the Ecology of Technology help?
For email, there is a simple solution that many people do not know about, but for those whom I have shared it with, they have come to love it.
Unroll.me is a service that allows the user to unsubscribe from all unwanted email subscriptions. Can you imagine! When the friend I described above used this free service, she told me that she felt a renewed sense of empowerment and understood more deeply what the Ecology of Technology movement is all about.
She awoke to the fact that she did not need to feel lost in a sea of technological actions, but rather, could become conscious around what she needs her technology to do and how she wants it to serve her.
When she shared this with us, we knew we had to get the word out about this service.
A service we recommend
So, here are our recommendations for effectively using Unroll.me:
- After you login, you will need to wait a minute or two for all your subscriptions to be detected.
- Once it is ready, you can go in and see which accounts you would like to keep in your inbox, unsubscribe from and which ones you would like to be added to your daily "roll-up", which is like a daily digest of emails.
- For anything you need to be on notice for, like banking updates, keep those email accounts in your inbox.
- For anything you have not been reading, engaged with or simply no longer care about, unsubscribe.
- For anything you would like to stay in the loop on, but don't necessarily want a separate email for, add them to your roll-up.
- For the next week or so, any remaining subscriptions that did not get detected will continue to come in. Simply use this time to continue unsubscribing and refining how you would like your subscriptions to function. You can always go in and change the decisions you've made.
If you like this service, share this blog post with a friend. We promise, they will thank you for it!
