"Many people use the inbox as a to-do list, calendar and filing system," says Mark Hurst president and founder of Creative Good, a consulting firm in New York. "File some messages and delete most of them, but without a doubt, don't let anything stay in your inbox permanently."

Hurst says effective e-mail management is built on filters, filing and ruthless use of the delete key.

Manage your e-mail so that is does not rule your workday

Business First of Louisville

by Denise O'Berry

If you sit at a computer for most of the day, it's tempting to constantly check your e-mail to see what's new. But that's a time management disaster if you're trying to make progress in your business.

Resist the temptation. Here are some tips to help you get that time-eating monster under control.

Turn off e-mail notification. It's just like a ringing phone that demands to be answered. Even in the instant world that exists today, e-mail can wait.
Establish a schedule for checking and responding to e-mails. Put it in your daily calendar and treat the time like an important meeting. Make sure you allocate a start and stop time. Reading and responding to e-mail can become an all-day affair.
Train your clients and customers on your response method and timing. Predictability will take your business relationships a long way, and you'll be a lot better off.
Set up files, folders and e-mail rules in your e-mail software to help you manage the type of messages you receive. Consider using your software's flag option to recognize e-mails that are critical.
Use your least productive time of day to read those "important-but-not-urgent" e-mails such as newsletters and general information items.

And don't forget to reassess the mail you receive on a regular basis, too.

Denise O'Berry is a small-business consultant in Tampa, Fla. Contact her at www.whatspossible.com

TIPS FOR MASTERING E-MAIL OVERLOAD

by Stever Robbins

Being at or near the top of your organization, everyone wants a piece of you. So they send you e-mail. It makes you feel important. Don't you love it? Really? Then, please take some of mine! Over 100 real e-mails come in each day. At three minutes apiece, it will take five hours just to read and respond. Let's not even think about the messages that take six minutes of work to deal with.

Shudder. I'm buried in e-mail and chances are, you're not far behind. For whatever reason, everyone feels compelled to keep you "in the loop."

Fortunately, being buried alive under electronic missives forced me to develop coping strategies. Let me share some of the nonobvious ones with you. Together, maybe we can start a revolution.

Read Stever’s Tips

More on Being organised

Conquer Your Email Overload: Superb Tips and Tricks for Busy People (Paperback) by Debbie Mayo-Smith
Everyone is wrestling with their bulging email inboxes at home and at work. We all know that email should be making life easier for us but is it? Conquer Your Email Overload will give you the tools to take control of your email and to make it work for you, in business and in your personal life. Following a simple question and answer - problem and solution approach, the book takes the reader through all the most common email frustrations, from losing an email, to dealing with email overload, so that you can make email work for you in your business and leisure activities.

Email Signatures - Nonprofits' Most Missed Marketing Tool

Email signatures (a.k.a. sig lines) are powerful, low-cost, high-return marketing tools (a virtual business card or ad) for your foundation or organization. What's interesting is how seldom sig lines are used.

Consider this: If your organization has 30 employees, each of whom sends 15 emails daily outside the organization, then (assuming 250 business days) that's 112,500 business cards or ads distributed annually, at no cost. If you have 100 employees, that's 375,000 cards or ads annually.

7 Steps to Better E-Mail Management

It's easy to get overwhelmed by your in-box, but these simple strategies can help you keep it all under control.

Does your organisation overuse email?

Just because we can send an email doesn't mean we should!

The planning team of a large institution often work on large collaborative projects. This often requires input from all members. They had been in the habit of sending emails to all members of the team for input and contributions. In a training session someone said: ‘I feel I let the team down when I'm slow to contribute to these group email discussions.'

How Not to Stick Your Foot in Your Mouth via E-Mail
by Reid Goldsborough

E-mail is the most common form of business communication today; it’s among the most common forms of all communication. Yet many people communicate poorly with e-mail.

That’s the opinion of Janis Fisher Chan, and I agree. Chan is the co-founder of Write It Well (http://www.writeitwell.com), a publishing and training firm operating out of Oakland, Calif., that, since 1980, specializes in helping businesspeople write clearly and concisely in e-mail and elsewhere. She also authored the newly published book E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide, as well as eight other books on business writing and additional topics.

I talked with Chan about why we write poorly in e-mail, what consequences this can have, and how we can improve.

More on Communication

How to check an e-mail's source without opening it

Have you found that the spam pests are becoming ever more tricky and you're getting more and more seemingly innocuous mail from people you've never heard of?

If in doubt, don't open. Instead, as it sits unopened in the Inbox, just highlight it and then right click. Choose 'Options', read down a few lines in the Message Options dialogue box - essentially the html and code behind the mail - and you can usually see who it's for. If it's spam the intended recipient (supposedly you) will almost always be a bogus name.

Are you kidding me? This is serious! Or, what psychologists have to say about writing e-mail

An old college friend and accomplished writer, John Scalzi, recently posted a list of writing tips for non-professionals, which I'd highly recommend for professionals and non-professionals alike. One of his most unusual suggestions is to "speak what you write" -- literally, to read your writing out loud before publishing, whether in a blog post or just an e-mail to friends. This, he argues, will not only help catch spelling and other errors (each of which Scalzi says decreases the writer's apparent IQ by 5 to 10 points), but also help you see whether you're conveying the meaning you intend.

So what does psychology research have to say about this notion? (No, not that typos decrease your IQ, but the larger idea that reading your words out loud will help you determine if your meaning is clear.)

9 Tips To Help You Write More Powerful Emails

By Suzan St Maur

1. Make the effort to learn about the etiquette (these days known as "netiquette") involved in writing emails. There are loads of good reference websites and books about the internet which will tell you the basics. I know it might seem a bit precious to attach so much importance to social niceties when the internet is basically very informal. However, whether we like it or not many people do take online etiquette very seriously. So if you're writing emails for business, you should assume that your recipient may well be one of those...

read on ...

E-Mail Marketing Trends: E-Mail Gets Bigger by Going Smaller

As people scan e-mails with preview panes, disabled images and tiny-screened handheld devices, savvy e-mail marketers craft campaigns that aim small--but think big.

Top 5 Traits of Successful E-Mail Marketers

What’s the difference between a good e-mail marketer and a great e-mail marketer? These 5 traits.

Why you need to pay attention to how your e-mail message looks in "preview panes"

You've heard me say it before and I'll say it again: The "first fold" of every sales web page is the most important part of your web site because your visitors will spend no more than 10 seconds deciding whether your page is what they're looking for...

That's why you need to pack in the benefits of your product or service and get straight to the point without wasting any space! And that's something you've probably heard before...

But did you know that this doesn't just apply to your web site? It also applies to your e-mail marketing...

Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Write Them Right

by Loren McDonald

Fifty characters could be all that stands between you and success in your next email campaign.

Fifty characters is all the space you have in a typical subject line to catch your reader's eye and entice him to open your email and take the action you want.

How could something so small make or break an email's success? Because many recipients use the subject line to decide whether to open or delete an email.

Subject lines are tricky devils, however. A good one can get your email opened in a flash, while a bad one could spell oblivion in the trash or junk file.

Because so much is riding on your subject line, we came up with 15 rules for crafting a good one. Be sure to review them before you send your next email campaign.