How I Triage My Newsletter Consumption

Ev Chapman
May 3, 2021

Have you ever suffered from newsletter chaos in your inbox?

Generally people view their inbox negatively. They contains tasks, snarky emails from co-workers or passive aggressive emails from clients. Then we have these newsletters that we genuinely want to read, but are crowded out by everything else.

I use a Triage system to deal with newsletters. Here's how it works.

Sparkmail has a smart inbox which automatically puts any newsletters into a special section for me. No fiddling around with filters, it's automagic! Once a week, I go through my newsletter inbox and triage.

SKIM. I do a quick skim of the newsletter to see if there is anything relevant I want to read. If not, I delete. If It does, I save for later.

SAVE. The best newsletters will link out to longer blogs where I can use the Notion web clipper to save into my library for later. If it doesn't, I'll simply star it to come back to later.

READ. Once I've triaged everything and everything is in my content library, I head on over to Notion and enjoy a host of articles from that week. I usually do this on a Sunday with a coffee in hand.

DELETE. Some weeks I skip the Sunday triage and my inbox ends up in chaos. If I start to feel anxious, I do not hesitate to hit CTRL + A + DELETE. I literally don't know what I've missed out on and I get to start fresh!

Don't let guilt creep in because you haven't gone through every single newsletter in your inbox. YOU are in control of what you let into your mind (and your inbox). Be ruthless as you triage and NEVER feel guilty for deleting or even unsubscribing.

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