de-cluttering my virtual space – part 1

31 December 2008 353 views 7 Comments

: Image by byrion via Flickr

The past couple of days I have been blogging about plans for the New Year and the CHANGES I plan on making to improve my way of life. So far I’ve created my not a New Year resolution, a life resolution and my not-to-do list for 2009. Now it’s time to tackle my virtual identity after all it is where I spend the majority of my day.

So I started off by cleaning out my Gmail account. I have all of my email forwarding over to Gmail so I can easily access all of my business mail when I’m away from my personal computer. It was an easy clean up since most of the emails were duplicates. Next I tackled my outlook in box, which has grown out of control. I had over 2000 emails in my spam folder alone and that was just 5 months of email! Because I didn’t want to go through every email in my Outlook I decided to just archive the year so it can be easily accessed at a moments notice.
Next on my list to de-clutter is my Google reader. I’m pretty sure I’m not using Google Reader to its full potential so if anyone has any tips please chime in here. What I did to help organize my Google Reader is divide my subscriptions into different categories. I have my awesome allies (thanks Jessica), celebrity baby scoop, my comment club bloggers, business advice, inner circle friends, and fun reads. I will be adding some cooking blogs and digital photography blogs, so if you know of any please leave me a comment.

Google Reader Questions
Is there a way to track stats through Google reader? Does it count as traffic to your site if someone reads your site through a reader?

Next steps: Managing my social networking sites

7 Comments »

Christie-A Work In Progress said:

OMG! I soooo need to do this. I have 823 messages in my inbox on gmail and I dont even want to tell you what’s in outlook. Thankfully they are all read but I still need to purge!

# 1 January 2009 at 10:09 am

Kristina Brooke aka Mom on the Rise said:

Happy New Year. We have a lot to look forward to in 2009 and I wish you the best. As for Google Reader? I have no clue. I stopped using it because I did not understand it. I use Bloglines and I know I am not using that to its fullest either.

I agree about the emails. I have all of mine forwarded to a Gmail account and try to keep my inbox clear.

Good Luck to you!

# 1 January 2009 at 11:52 pm

Michele @ The Integrated Mother said:

I’ve been so busy with physical clean-up in the last several days, but need to work on my virtual clean up. My blog reader - what a mess! Need to re-org that and my iTunes.

Happy New Year to you!!

# 2 January 2009 at 7:32 am

Lori said:

Sounds like something I really need to do! Welcome to Comment Club4!!
Lori

# 2 January 2009 at 9:01 pm

Carrie said:

I’ve been doing that too for the past few weeks. I never checked my gmail spam folder, and I had over 400 messages. My outbox and “all mail” folders have messages that I saved from over 3 years ago and have no use for (I’ll get to that one another time!).

# 5 January 2009 at 9:00 am

Brittany said:

I thought I was a nerd because I de-cluttered my email and the such! Now I feel better! =)

# 5 January 2009 at 10:05 am

Lisa @ Crazy Adventures in Parenting said:

Oh I need to do this too!!!!

I gave you an award, ‘ol bloggy friend of mine