Christina and Camera CHANGES

agg why do I have no idea how to start posts?

ANYWAY…. how was your weekend? Mine was great! My Dad was home, and a break from school is considered great no matter what, haha. On Friday, I talked about my goals for February (and I have already failed the journaling one… I didn’t journal on the 1st. I know, I’m a horrible person. Seriously. I might be able to catch up on that, but I don’t know, haha. And I ramble way too much.) but I also hinted at a couple fun new changes to Christina and Camera. Soo… here they are! I’ll also be sharing the results from my question about what posts y’all what to see.

 

Two posts per week// I’m changing up the amount of posts per week.  They’ll probably be a little shorter, but hopefully around the same length. I really want to get more content out there, and I love blogging, so we’ll see if this works out.

Email List// I seriously haven’t been able to use this like I wanted too. Most bloggers send out emails with their posts, but if I’m email subscribed to them too, it gets annoying. Soo… what do you guys want to see in the email list? The stuff that I normally put in there are things I want to feature on the blog, so I really don’t know! Maybe more personal stuff??? Honestly I have no idea.

More personal// Honestly, I’ve been treating blogging like a business. Posts have to be done by a certain date, I must have this amount of followers, I need to be as professional as possible, yada yada yada. While this mindset is great for some people (aka those who actually blog as their job) I really need to stop. Healthy goals//deadlines are great, but I don’t need them to be set in stone. Y’all’s favorites of my posts are generally the personal ones, and the impersonal, business-style posts don’t get much feedback. how did I just figure this out!?! Basically, I want to post more things that are peeks into my real life, and more things that are personal to you guys.

Post ideas// Here’s the part of the show post where larry comes out and sings a silly song I share the results for what you guys want to see. Plus does nobody get that reference? Please please someone get that reference. I don’t want to be the only Veggie Tales fan out there… *looks around awkwardly*

ANYWAYS.

I suggested 8  categories, and you guys also made up 2 more.

1. Devotional//Bible study series 4 votes
2.  DIY//Crafting 4 votes
3. Desk tour//organization ideas 5 votes
4. The Lego Vlogs 1 vote
5. Book reviews 5 votes
6. Tags//Q & A// Collabs 3 votes
7. Recent photography 4 votes
8. Planner//planning 5 votes
9. Animal related one of your categories, 1 vote
10. Movie reviews one of your categories, 1 vote

So. I’ll be sharing pretty much all of the categories with 4-5 votes this month (except Bible Study series, I’m still working on that, but hopefully I’ll be sharing that sometime in March or April.

 

SO.

 

Bye, see you all on Friday with another post! Please chat with me in the comments.

the pictures in this post are from unsplash, a lazy photographer’s best friend 

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Quick update

Hi everyone!

I am on a sort of vacation right now, so here are some updates!

My grandfather had a collapsed lung, so me, my mom, and sister came up to visit them and help them out. Please pray for them! He is an elder at his church and a devout Christian. We’re so thankful to all the people at our church who took care of my brothers throughout the week. Thanks, guys!

I don’t know how much longer I will be up here, but I’m still with them. My mom and sister had to head back home, though.

They are avid photographers, so I’m using their cameras to take photos every day. I will try to post a sort of trip diary for the times that I am there (I have some awesome pictures already!)

 

Just wanted to let you guys know what’s going on. I am not going to be sending out the mailing list while I am gone, so sorry!

Sign up for the camera club here.

Join the mailing list here.

 

I’m launching an email list??

Hello everyone! Today, I have a surprise that’s not really a surprise if you read the title.

I finally decided to launch an email list. Yay! Here’s what you will see if you sign up.

Mondays: Weekly Newsletter

This email will contain:

• Books I’ve been reading + Book Spotlight
• Posts coming up
• Goals for this week
• Spotlight: (Music, Product, etc…)

Fridays: Post Update

This email will contain:

• Sneak peek of the post + notifies you that new post is up.
• Behind the scenes of the post that just went up

If you’re interested in the content I will be providing, please sign up for my email list here.

I will be sending the first email on Monday at 1:00 PM EST, so please sign up by then if you would like to see that post. I will also be putting the newsletter every week in the sidebar for easy access.

 

The complete guide to clearing your inbox

Guess what I did on Sunday afternoon? I cleaned out my inbox!! And guess what it looks like now? There is NO new mail at all, and it really is very refreshing. Also, if you look at the image above, in the bottom left corner, it only has used 5% of the available space. That is cutting in half what it was before.

Why

Why should you clean out your email?

1. You don’t actually need a lot of the emails that you have in your inbox.

2. It’s really refreshing to have a clear inbox.

3. You can download old images and actually use them instead of just keeping them in your archives.

The process

This isn’t specifically how you do it, but it is how I did it.

1. Clear out old folders.

I used to store all of the blog posts from blogs I was subscribed to in folders. That wasn’t really the best idea. I never went back to look at them, and if I did, then it wasn’t by going to the folder- it was by going to the blog! I started by deleting these. If I did find something that was important to me (something that another person didn’t have a backup of, that I had gone back to look at multiple times in the last 6 weeks, or something that I knew I would need  in the future, I moved it into a new set of folders titled Important and divided into a subset of 5 folders: Blog, Family, Passwords, Photos, School. 

2. Clear Spam, Trash, and Promotions.

Unless it is actually something that shouldn’t be in these categories, most of the items in these folders can be completely deleted.

3.  Start throwing away unimportant items from your main inbox.

In this step, don’t begin to deal with sentimental items, items you’re not sure about, or items you know you want to keep. This step is for deleting stuff you know you don’t want, so it should be pretty easy. I actually cut the number of emails in my inbox in half by doing this (from 1000 to 500).

4. Items you’re not sure about.

This is when you can start thinking. If you haven’t looked at it in the last 6 weeks and don’t plan to in the next 6 weeks, then you probably don’t need it. However, this method isn’t right all the time, so you do decide to keep it, then categorize it into folders you’ve created. (If you haven’t done that yet, then do that now.)

5. Sentimental.

You can go through and read those old emails now. I had a bunch of totally embarrassing emails from when I was 7 that I thought would be really hard to delete. I ended up deleting them all; when would I need emails telling random people that Grandma was going to buy marshmallows? However, this may be harder for you, so if it’s really that hard, you can make a folder (I do stress, though, don’t put them in your important folders. Instead, make a folder titled ‘Sentimental’ so that you don’t mix them up with other, important, emails.

6. Review.

Is your inbox empty yet? If it’s not, complete the other steps again (Step 4 is probably most helpful), and when you are done, then it should be empty.

When my main inbox was empty, I went through my folders and narrowed them down even more. I downloaded all the pictures from the ‘photos’ category and deleted the original emails. I made sure I didn’t need old school emails and checked to make sure I had the backup of each thing. I checked old passwords to make sure they worked and made sure to delete those emails fully.

By now, your inbox is probably empty, and you are probably feeling really refreshed. For me, this only took probably an hour and 15 minutes total (45 minutes for steps 1-5 on Sunday and 30 minutes for step 6 on Monday), so it actually doesn’t take as long as you expect.

 

I know this was short, but I hope you enjoyed and that this was helpful!

Bye till next Friday,

Did you clean out your inbox? Talk to me in the comments 👇👇