Welcome to mouseandmen, a mobile IT Support and Technology Consulting team in NYC.

The email inbox is best kept empty or filled with work that needs our attention now. If your email inbox is filled to the brim, move it to a folder to process later. From now on, commit to process all email as it comes in. Delete or file the email right away. Its a hurdle for a lot of us to understand that in the digital world things work differently. In trying to clean up email overload often people create more problems by building complex folder structures. That reflects an analog way of thinking. In a digital world we can search for emails quickly. Try to build a simple folder structure.

The best place to start to manage the email deluge is with Gmail. Priority inbox is a new feature in Gmail that helps you see the emails that are important. Smart labels helps you classify your emails into categories. Gmail is the perfect offloading account for your email. Use it for those daily reads your have that are not pressing.

Next, we need to clean out the inbox and manage the inflow of emails. Most if not all email applications have built in tools to keep our email folders trim. Outlook has the ability to take your emails and run certain actions based on conditions that you set. Filters relieves you of the need to file your own emails. Here is a closer look at how to configure them. Check this link out for more information.

http://www.tinyurl.com/6balmyj

OSX Mail has a similar tool called rules. Once it becomes second nature, rules will make using email much less of a pain. Setup a rule once and Mail will take care of the handling thereon in. Check this link out for more information.

http://www.tinyurl.com/3cdnw7w

A lot of the spam we get is generated by all the sites we register with before we gain access. Next time, try using GuerrilaMail (guerrillamail.com). GuerrilaMail creates an email that lasts for 60 minutes. There is no registration required for GuerrillaMail. Other disposable email sites are 10 Minute Mail (10minutemail.com) and Mailinator (mailinator.com)

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.