Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Online Purging

I've been spending time this week cleaning up online accounts so that I can start 2010 with a fresh (or fresher) plate.  I had gotten lax about filtering my gmail account, and I had tons of advertising / spammish emails clogging up my inbox.  I've been working diligently at creating new rules so I can easily delete unwanted emails, while filtering others I don't want to lose. 

To do that, I create filters for incoming messages.  For all the advertising / newsletter / miscellaneous emails that come in, I route them all to a "ads" label.  If any are of particular interest, I can remove that label -- but otherwise once a month or so I pull up everything labeled "ads" and hit the delete button.  It quickly cleans up my inbox, which makes me happy.

Once I added about a hundred new emails to various filters, I went through and deleted almost 2000 emails.  Having them filtered into categories makes the deletions easy.

I also went through my feed readers and deleted all the feeds I rarely read, or are filled with drama, or are genuine train wrecks.  I use 2 different feed readers -- bloglines and google reader -- to separate personal and work-related feeds.  It felt especially good to delete the train wrecks (you know you read a few! But I decided to cut down on the drama that really has nothing to do with me next year.)  I deleted almost a hundred feeds from my 2 readers.

And, finally, I did a minimal purge on Facebook.  The new privacy settings have made it possible to hide your Wall from others, and I decided that if people were hiding their Wall from me, there was no reason for us to remain friends on Facebook!  At first, I was a bit pissy about it and hid my Wall from them -- and then decided to be a grown-up and handle it like an adult.  See above: cutting down the drama in 2010.

I set up some files for 2010.  It's too soon to close out most of my 2009 files, as there are things that won't be completed / resolved until mid to late January, but having the 2010 files created has allowed me to start filling things in for the new year.  I track blog tours, and freelance work, and the like in various Excel spreadsheets.

What about you?  Are you cleaning up your online world to get ready for 2010?

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:04 PM

    guess i need another class to know how to do all you mention, or is it just time to read, study, and practice to get familiar with the websites?

    SJ

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:38 PM

    Thanks for this post Melanie...after reading it I was inspired to do somewhat of the same. I don't get nearly as many emails it appears as you, but I did "clean it up a bit" removing & blocking emails from certain "groups". I also, went into my FB account, and boy was I glad I did (found out my account had been hacked). Decided to create a new password & remove & block "drama" as you would call it! Thanks for always helping us readers to clean, organize & give us something positive to look & forward too! I hope you won't "remove" your blog in an effort to clean up in 2010! Thanks again! J.....

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