It’s amazing how much email I get nowadays. While I never want to be that person who’s constantly attached to their inbox, it’s almost like you have to check your email regularly, or it’ll pile up and become overwhelming and unbearable.

But do you ever think about how much of the email that comes into your inbox is just plain garbage?

Seriously. Look at your inbox right now. How many of those emails are you going to open, and how many will you trash without even clicking on them? Of those you do open, how many will you actually read, as opposed to just skimming and then tossing them? And how many will you reply to?

For me, it was astounding to consider all of this. In the past week, I got roughly 125 emails. The majority of these were subscriptions, either from sports leagues I’m interested in, stores I’ve shopped at in the past, or some other organization requesting a call to action of some sort.

Of those 125 emails, I trashed about 100 of them. Some went instantly to the trash; others, I clicked on, briefly skimmed, and then got rid of. I ended up keeping only a small portion of those messages that I needed to file or maintain for reference or personal use.

Does this sound like you? Well, I’ve been slowly working to clean up my inbox over the past few months, and here’s the top thing I did. It’ll sound super simple, but trust me: it’s helped.

Whenever you get an email you don’t want or care about, consider not just deleting the message, but actually unsubscribing from the mailing list! This way, you’re not only taking steps to clear out your inbox today, you’re working on the future, too.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this has helped. It’s like every online store you’ve ever shopped at sends you messages at least weekly about their sales. Do you really need those? Maybe one or two, but not all of them. It cleans up my inbox and also helps me resist the temptation to online shop, mostly for things I don’t even need!

Some mailing lists can take days or even weeks to fully process your removal, so you may still get some messages in the meantime, but this can be a huge help.

So next time you’re going through your inbox, don’t just delete — unsubscribe.