I subscribe to about 25 newsletters. For a long time my relationship with them worked like this: subscribe with genuine excitement, read the first two issues, then watch the rest pile up in Gmail until the unread count made me feel bad enough to archive everything and start over.
The problem was never the newsletters. Most of them are good. The problem is that "good" and "worth my time this week" are different bars, and an inbox can't tell them apart. Every issue lands with identical urgency, mixed in with actual mail that needs answers. So the inbox becomes a guilt pile, and the genuinely great issue from a writer who posts once a quarter drowns under three "this week in JS" roundups covering the same three links.
Unsubscribing doesn't fix it either, because almost every newsletter earns its slot maybe once a month. You don't want zero issues. You want the right three.
Here's the workflow that finally worked for me, in two layers. The first layer you can build yourself in ten minutes. The second is harder, and it's where I'll disclose that I ended up building a product.
Layer 1: get newsletters out of the inbox entirely
