Put e-mail in its place: Experts offer tips on keeping your inbox manageable

Mike Davidson had a mountain of e-mail messages piling up in his inbox. He was responding to 80 to 100 messages a day and it began reaching the pain threshold for him. The good old days, when people used to get 25 normal messages a day – and very little spam – are long gone. These days e-mail is a time killer and a stress for Davidson, a Seattle businessman and co-founder of the Web news aggregator Newsvine.

Like others around the Web, he’s looking for solutions. His new approach is the five-sentence rule.

Every message he sends and every e-mail reply runs no longer than five sentences. A small explanation at the foot of each message tells his recipient what he’s trying to do. It also directs people to http://sentenc.es where he lays out his less-is-easier approach.

It’s not a sure way to cut down the volume of e-mail sent to him. But it gives him a small edge in how he approaches his crammed inbox. His inbox shrank from 300 messages to 30 or so, he said.

People who use e-mail throughout the day in business or in other activities have reported the same pressure to control the flow. English researchers recently studied the impact of e-mail on the lives of office workers and found many of those they watched were clearly twitchy, in not having a well-defined method to deal with e-mail.

Some workers checked their inboxes 40 times an hour and reported later feeling stressed, according to the research. One-third of the workers said they were stressed by the volume of e-mail and the need to reply quickly. Only 38 percent said they felt comfortable waiting a full day before replying.

That sentiment of dependence was echoed by Robin Toth, a business development director for Greater Spokane Incorporated. The idea of shutting down e-mail for hours at a time “frightens me,” said Toth. She said her job involves so much exchange of messages with colleagues that she can’t imagine not staying in regular contact via e-mail.

Approaches being preached for the stressed user vary from the slash-and-burn tactic that says get rid of all unneeded messages, to a complex solution using inbox filters that divert messages into different folders, each with a different priority.

One Web head with a middle-road approach is editor and writer Merlin Mann, founder of the advice site 43folders.com. Mann believes in an “Inbox Zero” philosophy, meaning the ultimate goal is reducing your daily e-mail inbox to almost nothing.

He advocates an active five-verb strategy: delete, defer, delegate, respond and do. Every incoming message, he said in an interview, should be quickly acted upon – even if it’s to send it to an archive for later review.

“At least you have an approach and a system,” he said.

For people who keep trying to catch up and dig out from under a pile of inbox messages, Mann advocates the DMZ approach. Simply put: create a folder called DMZ. Go to your inbox and select all, then move every message to the DMZ folder.

Then, as Mann says on his Web site, “Go and sin no more.”

Other advice offered by time-management experts to reduce e-mail stress:

“Turn off e-mail notification. Those little alerts can drive you buggy.

“Shut down your e-mail program for an hour at a time. People can always call if they need you.

“Forward infrequently. That only perpetuates the problem.