Email is a phenomenal tool. As an early adopter I am one of the first to promote the extensive advantages to email. I carry a Blackberry and conduct much of my business via email. However, in the last few years I have learned the drawbacks of email. Email is not a good avenue for a board meeting, confrontation, a love note, or firing. Many people do not understand what is appropriate information for an email and thus you get email overload.
I have heard of some corporations where employees are so addicted to email that they are receiving upwards of 400 a day. This reduces the average knowledge worker to no more than an expensive keyboardist. I hope that if you are one of those employees that receives that volume of email that you might take a moment to sit back and ask your employer why he or she allows that to go on on their network. That said, many of us get as many as 50 emails a day that need some form of attention. In years past I would take this information and place it into the myriad of folders I had organized in Outlook and inevitably forget to take care of one of them.
About six months ago I came across this article, by Merlin Mann, which changed my email life. As part of the GTD system, this email method essentially breaks down email into five categories. Those emails that need response, those that need action, those that are archives, those email to which you are waiting for a response, and those that you are holding (such as your latest Amazon order). By segregating my email by what needs to be done to it, and not by some random task category then I have been far more diligent about getting them done and I can regularly see which ones need to get done in the near future. It is also a wonderful thing to see a completely empty inbox, it is much less daunting.
This simple method of taking care of email has in a way saved my email life. I can not explain the number of hours that I spent going through folders trying to see which emails needed my attention. Today, I simply schedule a few minutes several times a day to categorize emails that have come in. Then I place time on my daily schedule to respond, or take action on those emails.
[Tags]productivity, GTD, email, advice, commentary[/tags]
I love pictures, in fact the entire wall behind the desk in my office is one giant bulletin board with no cork showing from all the pictures placed on it. My wife, however, will not allow me to do that same at home. Recently I came across this idea on 
For those of you that love your