How to get rid of digital clutter

CHICOPEE, Mass. (Mass Appeal) - How many e-mails do you have in your inbox? How far back to they go? You might be an e-mail hoarder. And e-mail clutter can sometimes be as stressful as physical clutter. Dr. Robin Zasio, clinical psychologist from the reality TV show "Hoarders" offers tips.

People save emails I believe it is a fear that if they let go of it, they will never be able to get it back, and they fear regret. The easiest thing to do would be to hold on just in case. A survey shows that people are getting over 200 unread emails every week, so if they are avoiding and not staying on top of it, we can do the numbers and see how the emails will build.

It actually causes stress because it's a task that you know you need to get to, and I believe when we push things aside or we procrastinate, that that produces a lot of emotional clutter. On top of that if you have got hundreds of emails in that inbox, that could prevent you from being able to access the ones that are important to you. So you might miss or lose emails that you really wanted to access.

We're in a digital world now, where so much of things that we do go through email and facebook and linkedin, and people are texting, and I think that people are defaulting to communicating more through email, rather than actual phone conversations.

We spending a lot of time online shopping, which signs us up for mailing lists, and that dumps in to the same account anyway, so it just keeps building and building and building. If you figure you are getting 200 emails, just a week, right? That's 20 decisions you have to make. It's really easy to gloss over things like newsletters or coupons coming through, and just be selective about the ones that you feel like you need to address immediately and then as I mentioned the clutter begins to build.

The survey I mentioned earlier, found out people are juggling up to three email accounts at any one given time. I recommend finding one email service that you can bring all of those accounts in, so all of your emails coming in go to just one inbox. Hotmail offers a wonderful school called suite. Basically with one click you can designate certain emails to go in to folders and access them when you want. Likewise, you can have other emails that you know you don't want to see that keep coming in, those can be deleted automatically as well, and it works while your computer is off, so when you open up that inbox you will have much fewer emails to actually go through. Finally, don't procrastinate going through your inbox. Spend 15 minutes a week decluttering and staying on top of it.

It's not the number of emails you have, it's how it is interfering with your life emotionally, and are you spending a lot of time trying to go through those emails, and are you losing emails and things like that. So it's more of the impact. The reality is, depending on your work, your life, you might have thousands of emails that are either in folders or saved in some way. It doesn't mean you have a problem. It's when it interferes with your life that it is a problem.