Kwame Busia

Today I’m making an active effort to unsubscribe from all those e-mail newsletters I don’t read any more and even worse the ones I don’t remember suibscribing to. When you’re using Google Mail it’s kind of manageable because I just set a filter and all my newsletters would go nicely and neatly into a newsletter folder ready for that rare occasion that I might actually read them. Problem is I can’t figure out how to get those filters to have the same effect when my e-mails are pushed to my Blackberry. So my phone goes off every twenty seconds with some newsletter or some offer and it really makes you think, why did you subscribe to all these things anyway? It’s like a hangover, it creeps up on you incrementally. When you’re at the bar downing shot after shot, it’s not a big deal until the next day. We can apply that same thinking to subscribing to newsletters. In a way sometimes, maybe we subscribe because we’re greedy. We don’t want to miss out on that juicy bit of information or that deal we can’t resist in a sale coming down the line, so we hardly ever think twice when giving our email address out to subscribe to this or subscribe to that. But when you open your inbox and have 50 new messages and only 2 are of any significance, Houston… We have a problem. I want to think from now on, when my Blackberry starts ringing, its because I’m receiving a message I actually want to read, from someone I actually know. Which is why I unsubscrribing from everything that isn’t essential and from all the feeds I never read etc. So when I wake up tomorrow and check my messages it’ll be nice and minimal. Here’s hoping anyway…!