My Word of the Year is Unsubscribe

Designing Moves
Jan 6
2 min read

I missed paying a bill in October. Not because I'm disorganized or irresponsible, but because it was buried under hundreds of promotional emails I received. I found out from a persistent call that I had not paid my last bill. I do not like to get statements by email since they are easily lost, but some companies are charging $3.00 to have a mailed statement.

That was my breaking point.

My word of the year is unsubscribe. And honestly, it might be the most liberating thing I've done for myself in years.

We talk about decluttering our homes, organizing our closets, and tidying up our physical spaces. But what about the digital chaos quietly suffocating us every single day? The 15,000 unread emails. The phone storage constantly full. The endless scroll through duplicate photos we took "just in case."

Digital clutter isn't just annoying—it's costly. That missed statement could have caused a problem. Important messages from actual humans get lost in a sea of "FLASH SALE" and "You won't believe this ONE TRICK." We waste mental energy scanning, scrolling, and ignoring instead of focusing on what actually matters.

So here's what I'm doing about it, and what you can do too:

Start with email. Every newsletter you haven't opened in three months? Unsubscribe. Every retail store sending daily promotions you ignore? Unsubscribe. Be ruthless. If you worry you'll miss something, remember: you're already missing things that actually matter because of all this noise.

Set up filters. Route receipts and confirmations into a separate folder automatically. Let your email work for you instead of against you.

Delete the obvious. Screenshots from 2022. Blurry photos. That PDF you downloaded and never opened. Start small—just 10 minutes tackling your phone's camera roll or downloads folder makes a surprising difference.

Update your phone. If you have a newer iPhone, iOS 16 and later has a built-in duplicates detector that merges duplicate photos in seconds. It's almost magical how much space you'll reclaim.

The goal isn't perfection. It's breathing room. It's finding the invoice when you need it. It's opening your phone without that low-level anxiety about storage space. It's reclaiming your attention from the companies fighting for it.

My word of the year is unsubscribe—and it applies to more than just emails. It's about unsubscribing from digital overwhelm, from the belief that I need to keep everything "just in case," and from letting my devices stress me out instead of serving me.

What's one thing you could unsubscribe from today?