Do you remember the first time you got your first email address? What was the feeling like? Did it file like you were now part of a cool group of people? The online community? I don’t know your reasons for getting an email address because there are many reasons for getting one. It could be business, pleasure, or pressure. Be that as it may, the first few days you have an email address are not that bad. They are fun even, as you familiarize yourself with how the technology works. But things get very annoying the moment you start linking your email to social media accounts.

When you start signing up for social media accounts, you eventually sign up to several of them. People often, at least have a social media account for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and perhaps Snapchat. That is just my estimation; it is not necessarily based on any concrete statistics. The problem is that once you sign up to any social media account with your email, you start receiving notifications through email. Something happens on Facebook, you get an email. Something happens on Twitter, you get an email notification. Chances are that the same is true for almost any other social media account you have.

You know that things are out of control when your inbox indicates that you have 1000+ unread emails. When are you ever going to go through all those emails? The thing is that, after some time, you stop looking at email notifications from social media because you soon realize that most of those notifications are pointless. It makes you wish there was an email unsubscribe tool.

Who cares whose birthday it is today? All people whose birthdays matter are on your mind already. If you had 365 friends on Facebook and each one’s birthday corresponded to a different day of the year, does that mean every day you will be busy wishing people happy birthday?

People don’t even remember the birthdays of their significant others, their anniversaries, and even their very own birthdays, why should you care about the birthday of strangers you barely know? I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about the birthdays of people, what I’m essentially saying is that some things are just blown out of proportion and it is impractical to get notifications for irrelevant things. I’m mostly referring to Facebook here.

Then, when you are busy exploring the web, you come across websites that offer different services that may or may not be of interest to you. They also would like you to sign up for their newsletters. If you are interested, you sign up to a few of them; let’s say around five of them because you’d really like to know what they are up to. Now you have around nine email notifications to deal with every day; four from the social media accounts I mentioned earlier and five from the websites you hope will be of value to you.

These things can happen within around three months of getting an email address. Now, imagine what will happen after a year? Two? Five? Chances are that you’ll be like me. I have around five email addresses. Of the roughly five email addresses, I only use three officially. The rest have 1000+ unread emails from various social media accounts and newsletter subscriptions. I’m not the only one. It is a trend nowadays just to open an email address for the sake of giving it to websites that demand you provide an email address for them to allow you to enjoy their services.

Now imagine someone with an executive position in a company, like a CEO. This CEO, without lifting a finger, has to deal with 10, 20, or even 30 email correspondence in a day. And most of these are to and from kind of correspondence – as in, they receive an email, reply, receive, reply, and the cycle continues. Furthermore, imagine someone like this also having to deal with useless email notifications from social media accounts and newsletters from other online services. Do you see how annoying that is? It is also exhausting and frustrating.

It is for these reasons you should have a way of managing your email(s). Here are a few tips.

• Separate business from pleasure. Create >different email accounts for different purposes. Have a separate email for official purposes and an email for services you are not very interested in but are forced to sign up for with an email.
• Unsubscribe from unwanted, irrelevant, or useless emails from social media or any other service that ceased to be of importance to you. Consider using an email unsubscribe tool to make things easier if you are dealing with many emails.
• Be your own person; don’t give in to peer pressure. Only have social media accounts that are important to you personally. It makes sense for people who are visual and into photos to be on Instagram or snapchat. But it does not make sense to have these accounts because everyone is doing it.
• Choose a time for reading emails. Some people do it once a weak, others, once a day, others in the morning, others in the evening, and others never read them. Pick a specific time, as reading emails all the time wastes time and energy. They are often not that important.