Uncluttered Inbox = More Family Time

This past weekend the kids and I crashed Laila's house.  It was so nice to get together and the kids had so much fun.  We spent a lot of time drinking tea and visiting discussing Significantly Simple and where we want to go with it.  We're so grateful to have readers who enjoy what we do.  We've grown so much in such a short time and we couldn't have done it without all of you.  That being said, we spend a lot of time online feeding our blog addictions researching topics so we can put together fabulous posts for our fabulous readers.

With summer coming, Laila finishing up her homeschooling year, and me working while the kids finish school, we're starting to feel a bit frazzled with trying to keep up with everything - kids' activities, work, school, planning our summers, etc, we've decided to streamline our internet usage, including Significantly Simple.  (Stay with me, Laila!!)  We're all about keeping things simple, living authentically, and spending significant (read:  quality) time with our families, so we've decided to slow down our posts for the next little while to really enjoy our kids over summer - give them as much time as they would like without having to worry about anything else, really.  For the next 3 months, family time will dictate our computer usage!  For my family, that will include splash parks, sand dunes, canoeing, camping, and road trips.

My little guy (then 3) sketching the river.

So, in a nutshell, you'll see us posting Meal Planning Mondays, Wordy Wednesdays, and Friday Finds one week and then we'll post to Meal Planning Mondays, Tree Hugging Tuesdays, and Authentic Thursdays the next week.  Not only will we be less taxed, you will have more free time to spend with your own family and friends!

And on that note:

Do you love to subscribe to blogs and other sites? I do! I really, really do! A little too much, actually. I read one great post and all reasoning skill goes out the door by adding another blog subscription to my already too-large list of subscriptions and RSS feeds. At one point, I was subscribing to over 40 different sites.

Although I do love the thought of RSS feeds, I found that I wasn't actually reading them because:


1. I'm an 'all or nothing' kind of girl - if I can't go through all of them at once, I won't bother starting. It would get to the point where I would see the number of unread posts (sometimes 30 per site) and put it off until tomorrow.
2. RSS feeds go to folders at the bottom of my screen. My 'inbox' (and folders I've set up) appear at the top of my screen. By the time I finished with my inbox emails (subscriptions), I couldn't be bothered to go through my RSS feed subscriptions.

So how do you  unclutter your inbox?  Take 5 mintues (I promise you it will take only 5 minutes!) and do the following:

• Go through your list of blogs.  Just by looking at the names, do you know what the site is about? 
• If the answer is yes, keep them.
• If the answer is no, delete them.  Don't think about it.  Just do it.
• Ask yourself a couple of questions:
• Of the remaining sites, which 5 do you like the most?  (That would be four plus ours!) Keep them.
• Of the remaining sites,  which 5 do you like the least?  Delete them.
• Are there sites you generally like, but things about it irk you?  Delete them.  Life is too short to be irked by something that is supposed to give you pleasure.
• For me, the next step was to drag my RSS folders from the bottom of my screen to the top into the inbox folders.
• I then created folders that all new incoming email subscriptions would be filed in upon receipt.

I'm now down to 7 sites that I follow, and I'm so much happier - I have time to give them all a quick read at some point during the day, and I don't feel overwhelmed when my email says I'm receiving 42 messages.  All of my subscriptions go to their own folders, so the only messages that show up in my regular email stream are those from family and friends. And Pioneer Woman.  I can't help it. {insert nervous laugh here}

Aaaanyway, make sure to unclutter your inbox to allow you Significantly Simple time with your family in the weeks and months to come.  :)

Happy Thursday!  :D