10 Tips for Dealing With Email Overload

Want to deal with email overload, here are 10 tips to follows:

1. Unsubscribe. Be honest, and cancel your unread subscriptions.
2. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to messages from retailers and social network notifications. It’s not exactly spam, because you’ve signed up to receive it, but not necessarily useful either. Move your necessary twitter and facebook notifications to your private email where you can give them their due.
3. Use RSS. Get the information you need via an RSS feed and move subscriptions out of your inbox and into your RSS reader.
4. Aggressively archive into folders. Look for anything in your inbox more than two weeks old. Consider dumping these into an archived folder where you can find the information later if you need it and get them out of the inbox.
5. Use filters and rules. Set up automated rules that route those emails directly to folders so they bypass your inbox.
6. Color-code. Use colors so you can scan your inbox and read the important mail before you tackle everything else and makes it much more likely you won’t miss critical email.
7. Get tasks onto a to-do list. Once you move an item to your to-do list, you can archive the email off into a folder where you can read it again later if you need to.
8. Batch process. Try to process email a few times a day rather than getting caught up in it constantly.
9. Turn off new email notifications. If you’re getting pop-ups or other invasive notifications of new email, turn those off now! They can be a constant distraction that only increases your feeling of overload, and it detracts from the idea of batch processing email
10. Send less. The more email you send, the more you will receive in return; sending email encourages other people to reply. Before you email someone, think about whether you could use another method., such as CIFOR Today.

Source: CIFOR Today, August 12,2011

Picture: via Getty Images