As I’ve been spending more time on other parts of my life (a lot of it work, for reasons that will become apparent) rather than blogging, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that my husband has gone back to school. In September he started the first of 3 years at university to earn his BFA. This means we’ve gone from living on two artist’s salaries (getting along fairly well, no debt, but we weren’t going to be buying a house any time soon) to my artist’s salary + temping as much as possible (not seriously worried about paying rent+bills+food, but not paying anything else, including school fees).

We’ve had a necessary lifestyle adjustment which is slowly getting easier. We were both lucky enough to have our first (in my case, only) rounds of post-secondary education paid for by amazing parents. This time, we’re on our own, and we have the line of credit to prove it. We did pay off the first semester before Christmas, but 2013 started out in the hole because I went on an almost month-long trip of a lifetime with my mum. He doesn’t begrudge me that, and I’m so happy I went, but we’re only just starting to dig out of the hole that that created.

Talking about our finances in front of the entire interwebs wasn’t the purpose of this post though. I’ve noticed, after almost 9 months of being married to a student (he did a training program this summer as well), that I feel like I need less, and not just in the ‘buying less’ sense. I’m looking critically at my closet/cabinets/bookcases and weeding things out. Pulling out the high heels that I wear twice a year that my feet need 2 weeks to recover from. Sure, I may try to find a consignment store to take the nicer things to, rather than just dumping it all at Value Village, but buying less has turned in to wanting (slightly) less.

It is also encouraging me to use what is already in the house. Rather have black beans in the chili we’re making? Well, we only have kidney beans, so deal. I’m almost out of my bottle of body wash. I prefer gel to soap, but we have soap in the cupboard, so when the bottle is gone, I’ll use bar soap. When the bar is used up, of course I’ll buy more gel, so really I’m just postponing that expense, but it helps. And someone might buy me another gift basket with a bar of soap in it between now and then, so I can save that $7 for another month.

Now if I can just train P out of his Tim Horton’s habit, I might be able to buy myself a skein of yarn for a treat.

In my digital clearout, I started with the email. After all, it was ‘Inbox 0′ that inspired me to give the whole thing a go. I started with 1800+ emails in my inbox. Currently, I’m down to 447.

Now, it isn’t that I don’t want to keep anything, I want to keep emails! It isn’t like P and I write each other physical love letters, there will never be a shoebox full of those. But there are sweet emails, and the nostalgic part of me wants to keep those – our generation’s version of a dusty box full of airmail envelopes. I didn’t delete those, but I moved them to an appropriate folder. All the emails mum sent me when we were planning our trip went into the ‘Burma’ folder. I’ve got 25 folders apart from Inbox/Sent/Deleted. So, some of those 1400 lost emails aren’t gone-gone, they’ve just been rehoused somewhere more appropriate. That’s fine, they’re off of the page I see daily, I can reread them when I want to re-live those moments.

I did really delete a lot though. I found the easiest thing to do first was to sort by sender, and scroll through to see who I still had big chunks of mail from. Banana Republic sales? Gone. Daily work schedules from all my past shows? Gone. Grouping by sender like that really helped me clear out the chaff in big sweeps. After a first go-through like that, I put it back to being sorted by date, and went through from the oldest emails. I didn’t do that all in one day, I’d do little bits at a time, sometimes even sitting down and scrolling to somewhere random and deleting/filing from there. Things from P are safe, so are most emails from my parents. I tended to delete the ones that were just a link and nothing else, and kept the ones where we were actually talking to each other. Sometimes though, figuring out the conversation isn’t easy. For some unknown reason, my mum never replies to an email, she writes a new one, which leads to emails along the lines of: “I love the second one, but the third link is a little too bright.” So some of those went as well.

There are some emails causing me grief though. There are ones where mum and I have been fighting (most of them in the months leading up to the wedding, fancy that). I don’t like reading them, they make me feel sad, and we’ve moved on. But, for some reason I don’t want to delete them. Although I try not to remember those times in my head, I for some reason don’t want to delete all evidence of them. Most of those I’ve put in the wedding folder, so whatever alien anthropologist unearths and decodes my computer hundreds of years from now will understand how stressful primitive human weddings could be.

Even though I’m at 447 now, and not 0, I feel good. Every time I sit down to check my email (which I’m also trying to do less) I scroll down and delete/move a few. I try to get to a round number each time. I also don’t want to add hundreds of folders, I’m trying to keep them general enough that lots of things can go in one. For instance, there is just the one folder relating to the wedding, although the ‘Travel’ folder has subfolders for different trips. Those are other emails I deleted, flight notifications for flights I’ve already gone on. I don’t need a record of every flight I’ve ever taken to visit my parents!

I also found that I’d kept every email Etsy had ever sent to me from my store, which I’m currently taking a break from. Each time something sold, I’d get a notification from Etsy, and one from Paypal. I can also look up my entire history on both of those websites. If all that history is there once I sign in, why do I need to keep the emails? For now they’re in an ‘Etsy – Selling’ folder, but I’m starting to think that I can completely can that one. The shop has also been closed for a few months , so none of them are terribly recent. Maybe if I started up again, I could keep the Etsy notification only, and only until I knew it had arrived. But when I think hard about it, even that seems unnecessary.

So, so far, Operation: Email Clear-out is going quite well, even if those last 400 are the hardest to get through.

So apparently another Alt Summit happened. I stopped following them a while ago, when I realized I didn’t want my blog to be a brand or a business, but just me. I only noticed because there were all sorts of new info graphics on Pinterest the other day. While scrolling quickly through all the Pins I’d missed (have I mentioned I was on vacation and mostly internetless for most of January?) one thing jumped out at me.

That one thing was the concept of ‘Inbox 0′, and the phrase really resonated with me. Apparently Inbox 0 is a whole movement, there’s websites devoted to it, steps to take, processes to implement… that’s about where I stopped reading. Does it sound like I don’t read anything through to the end any more? Because that’s certainly how I feel, and after having the phase ‘Inbox 0′ bounce through my cranium for a while, I feel like I have an idea of why.

I don’t have a work email*, just my personal email. My personal email has 1800+ emails in the inbox (not to mention the 400+ that I arrived back home to after 3 weeks away). These aren’t 1800 unread emails, I can’t stand to see that little red number staring at me. They’re all there because I rarely do anything with emails after I’ve read them. That’s a lot of clutter, most of it useless.

Then I thought about Pinterest, and looked at my numbers 880+ pins, 330 likes. I had no idea I’d pinned that much, but that explains not being able to find things when I looked for them again… and wasn’t that the point of Pinterest?

I logged in to Ravelry and looked at my 12-page queue, and my favourites tab and wondered again what the difference is between the two.

And (confession time) I’ve been too scared to look in my bookmarks folder in Firefox. I don’t even know how many bookmarks I have.

This, all this, is clutter. Baggage. Why do I need an email copy of an Etsy receipt of something I bought 2 years ago? It arrived, I left feedback, I’ve been using it for 2 years. If I want to look up how much it cost or who I bought it from, I can log on to Etsy for that info. I don’t care what was on sale at Banana Republic in May of last year, why haven’t I deleted that? Why am I letting it clutter up my inbox, and make myself scroll past it and all its cousins the few times I ever do need to search for something old?

And so, slowly, I’m going through all these digital repositories and weeding ruthlessly. Or at least doing a gentle first pass to make myself feel good, and then going back and being ruthless.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to 0 in my inbox. And 0 certainly isn’t the point of Pinterest, but I don’t feel I need all 1200+ of my combined pins and likes. (How are pins and likes different? How should we use these two tools?)

Here is where I could put in a lovely designer quote-graphic-thing, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” – William Morris. But I’m going to refrain, so it doesn’t get pinned and forgotten. Such a rule to live life by needs to be internalized, digested, not stuck through like a butterfly in a box. And I know dear Mr Morris couldn’t have imagined the digital clutter the world would gather, but I think it applies just as well to my inbox as to my kitchen cupboards.

As I go through all this, with no set goal time of ‘Inbox 0 by March 12 or bust!’, I’m going to keep writing here about it.

*Well, when I’m on contract, there’s a general one we the SM team use, but that’s just for 8 weeks at a time, and I’m not usually the one that does the most of the emailing. Besides the point.

Sometimes you see really pretty things walking home from downtown late at night.

Like a streetlight shining through the leaves of a tree that is just turning yellow.

Other times, you see dudes peeing against walls, so you know. Balance.