Stop Drowning in Email

Depending on what one's concept of progress is, E-mail can be a blessing or a curse. Nobody needed email until they got it. Email has rapidly become the most widely-used means of communication for both personal and business use. In fact in business email is now as indispensable as the telephone for conducting business and is quickly replacing regular mail (or snail mail) and even the fax machine as the primary means of sending documents. It is fast, convenient and can save you money. Supposedly it can help you manage your time better, and in that regard being an efficient email user is now becoming an essential professional skill. You could even say that your email habits will say as much about you as your other work habits. In their personal space a great many people access their email on their cell phones and in so doing "carry" their email around pretty much 24 x 7. A lifetime ago I signed up for a bulletin board service (the pre-cursors to the Internet) and got my first exposure to electronic messaging. My reaction: Awesome! This is really cool! Now I don't have to phone people and leave voice-mail! Zapping information back and forth at the speed of light will be a big productivity boost! How naive I was. E-mail became the Internet's first killer app, and therein lies the problem. Particularly seeing how I can get upwards of 250 emails a day. Now, for me, email is becoming a problem and I'm drowning. I've heard this from a number of people.

It would seem somewhat odd that I'm writing an Internet column and yet I'm moaning about email. Well, its not email itself that is the problem, its the volume of email, the clutter, that has become the problem. As email grew into the killer app it now is, its strengths became its weaknesses. The ease with which you could dispatch pretty much anything at all, whether the recipient wanted it or not, meant that inboxes just get more and more full. Its all too easy to click "Forward" or "Reply to All". Quite simply, there are just too many messages. So what now? I've heard a similar complaint from a number of people - there is just too much email flying around and its getting more and more important to get your email organised. In short, getting on top of your email has become critical.So, I went out looking for the most useful tools I could find to accomplish this task. I was extremely pleased with what I found:

• Xobni - www.xobni.com

  Xobni (Inbox backwards) rocks! Outlook is suprisingly bad when you lots of content and Xobni can help you organise a flooded inbox. Even Bill Gates raved about it.

• Taglocity - www.taglocity.com

  Taglocity aims to improve Outlook by making it like Gmail. It turns messages, contacts, calendar entries, etc. into taggable items or virtual folders, much like Gmail does.

• Clear Context - www.clearcontext.com

  Clear Context aims to "make your inbox useful again" by filing and organising email, grouping information by project and turning emails into appointments and tasks.

• 43 Folders - Inbox Zero - www.43folders.com/izero

  This is a website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. There are articles and tips, one of which, Inbox Zero, focuses on clearing your Inbox

• Claritude Speedfiler - tinyurl.com/2fneux

  SpeedFiler is a tool which integrates with Outlook to make it easier to file messages. If you have many mail folders, SpeedFiler will save you fortunes if time.

• POTS - Plain Old Telephone System

  Instead of sending an email, why not make a quick phone call :-)