Email Overload

Email overload is such a big problem that I believe your Site Pro News
subscribers would love to read several practical tips for coping.

If you wish to publish this article in Site Pro News, please feel free to
include it entirely or edit as you see fit. I think it would be beneficial
to include the short bio and links at the bottom of the article.

If you wish to take part in our Affiliate Program, please join and replace
my links in the article with your Affiliate link. (You can get to our
sign-up page through this link: http://www.emailorganizer.com).

Should you publish this article please let me know when you put it on your
website and/or include it in your ezine.

I look forward to your response.

Best regards,

Terry
===================
Terry Johnston
Vice-President Marketing
Caelo Software Inc.
direct: +1 604.269.9006
mailto: tjohnston@caelo.com
http://www.emailorganizer.com

Press kit:
http://www.caelo.com/presskit.html
Recent NEO press reviews:
http://www.caelo.com/pressinfo/neorev.doc

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Email Overload - Coping Strategies

By Terry Johnston

We're here... the information age! Having fun yet? What's that you say....
too much information, finding the spammers are getting the best of you,
facing a bloated INBOX everyday, too many friends are sending you those
silly jokes and greeting cards, dealing with a mountain of lists and ezines
that you spend more time sorting & deleting than reading, can't find that
"important" email in the haystack, can't meet those deadlines because you're
so preoccupied with sorting out your email?

THIS is the information age? What, pray tell, comes next.... Perhaps "The
Information Organization Age" - Bingo!

You've all heard the statistics:
* Every day 8 billion emails are exchanged on the Internet.
* By 2005 this figure will increase to 36 billion.
* 81% of corps. that implemented email did so to improve efficiency
.
* The average email user in business spends at least 2 hours a day
dealing with email.
* According to Internet researcher Jupiter Media Metrix, by 2006
consumers are expected to receive an average of 1,400 pieces of junk e-mail
every day!
* Yada yada yada.

Resources:
Email organizing software does exist -- check out:
http://www.emailorganizer.com and http://www.amikanow.com as well as
websites that provide information that help with email overload such as
http://www.email911.com and http://www.OvercomeEmailOverload.com.

Coping tips:
For those of you brave individuals who want to take a stab at manual
organizing here are some practical, tried and true strategies:

USE MULTIPLE EMAIL ADDRESSES
Although most of you have already figured this one out, it's worth
mentioning because it's so fundamental to an anti email overload strategy.
One way to think of your correspondence is Personal and Public. For
instance, you can open webmail accounts (e.g. Hotmail & Yahoo!) for your
public, not-so-critical correspondence. This could include registering when
you download software and utilities from the net, marketing promotions, chat
rooms and message boards. Your Personal address is reserved for higher
priority business contacts, friends, relatives and associates. Although I
now use email organizing software, hence my need for webmail accounts has
dimished dramatically, at my peak I had well over a dozen accounts going.
One caveat to this webmail strategy is that both Hotmail and Yahoo! are now
applying strict minimum usage rules (they'll close the account if it's not
checked in with frequently). Many people apply this strategy using POP
accounts.

THE GOLDEN RULE
Help your friends and colleagues cope with their email overload by NOT
contributing to it! You know how it goes: "do unto others..." It's the old
cause and effect thing. Unless they've expressed an interest, perhaps you
can hold back on sending those jokes, greeting cards and CCing them on
every-little-bit-of-business. While we're on CCing, it's important for
companies to develop a policy on what to CC and to whom. If your company
doesn't have a policy in place maybe it's time for you to be the Corporate
Hero and...

DEAL WITH A MESSAGE ONLY ONCE
How many times have you read a message, flagged it for follow-up, came back
to it, read it again, perhaps left it until you have more time, came back to
it, read it again... then replied. This is not a very efficient use of your
valuable time, is it? A great discipline is to deal with the message once.
That is to say, once you've committed to reading it, reply right away before
you go on to the next message.

DON'T REPLY TO 'EVERY' MESSAGE
That heading was hard for me to write because one of my pet peeves is when
people don't reply to me. (I'm getting over it.) The fact is that it's NOT
necessary to reply to every message. Especially with those one-word
replies... like: Great, Cool, Thanks, Beauty etc. Remember the Golden Rule?
Those short, sometimes meaningless, replies are often only contributing to
the recipient's email overload.

CREATE FOLDERS
Most email clients allow you to set up folders. Although limited in scope,
people, project and client specific folders can reduce a lot of stress,
especially when it comes to finding a message. I know people who religiously
go through their Inbox and drag and drop each and every message into a
folder (including a trash folder). Time consuming and tedious yes, but in
the overall scheme of things folders can make your email existence much
easier.

SPAM BUSTING
Don't fall prey to the "oldest spamster trick in the book" - don't use the
unsubscribe feature in spam messages (not to be confused with Lists and
Ezines). Spam marketers and list providers use the unsubscribe feature to
qualify email addresses! Do you see the irony?

You can consult with your ISP. More and more ISPs are providing spam
filters. You can also forward the spam you get to the FTC. Send it to
uce@ftc.gov


I hope these suggestions have brought you some hope. This list, of course,
could extend to many more pages but I'd better let you go.... You've got
tons of email to deal with!! Happy organizing!