Today email is a crying baby that needs to be fed. We wake up in the morning to a deluge of email waiting for us. Throughout the course of the day, the inbox draws us in and demands more of our time. Is anybody getting any work done?

I once read a quote by a business owner who said that “Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent. The year he said that was 1917 and the invention that plagued him was the telephone. It seems we have struggled with managing information before email too.

The email inbox of today compared to the one on our desk twenty years ago has evolved into something else all together different. For starters, the sheer volume has increased. You are no longer just getting passed documents from coworkers but the entire world seems to stream to our virtual doorstep at the inbox.

The human element, too, gets in the way. Technology is moving at a pace faster than we can handle. Few people consider that they must tame their inbox to be productive. Multitasking has permeated our lives at the micro level: bus drivers text on the highway; pedestrians walk into oncoming traffic while checking their email. Emails immediacy engenders in us a urgent need to respond.

Software does not help the situation either. Email applications interrupt us while we do our primary work to tell us that we have even more mail in our inbox. The fact that there is application called “Freedom” is telling: Freedom disconnects you from the internet and email for a period of time so you can get to work. How crazy is it that we need an app like that?

There are some remedies out there that can help us. In my next post, I will discuss ways we can bring control back to our inbox.