Don’t throw away the baby…

Yesterday I recommended Simpleology as the tool I use for setting goals and sticking to them. It is stellar at helping a scatterbrained person like me stay focused and on task.

Today I heard from someone who had signed up, and who complained to me that she gets occasional email from the Simpleology folks “advertising” other related products.

I think some people don’t sign up because of being annoyed about getting an occasional email.

But there are much better solutions to that problem than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In this case Simpleology is the baby, and the emails are the bathwater.

The simplest approach? Unsubscribe from the emails from Simpleology! In each email, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom. And they do honor it.

I know that because I unsubscribed one address to use a different one.

Instead of unsubscribing altogether, using that separate email address is my approach. I want to hear about products related to improving myself. But I don’t have time to read every single email for every product that comes along. So I have one email address solely for that purpose. Now that address gets 20+ messages a day from people marketing various personal improvement stuff (and often giving out valuable free advice in the process).

Do I read it all? No way. But occasionally one catches my attention, and I do read it. Usually (but not always) I get something out of doing that. Sometimes I don’t. If I have a big deadline, it is easy to ignore it for a few weeks. If I am on a self improvement kick, then I pay more attention.

Just a note – we’re not talking about ads for viagra here. We’re talking about emails that have ideas, information, and products that might actually be useful.

On that note, have you signed up for my email list? I work hard to keep the ratio of useful information very high.