There are four main ways in which it is possible to keep on top of your inbox, and avoid the panic that comes with email stress and the significant loss of time that the inevitable email overload causes.

The first method is very simply. Carefully highlight all of the emails in your inbox. Then, gently press the delete button.

Whilst this is certainly the quickest method, it isn’t overly conducive to email productivity, and you may find your Outlook contacts have something to say about your filing methods when they hear of your unique method of email management.

The second method is to spend several hours of your day ploughing through the stacks of emails in your inbox and responding to those that you can. The problem with this though, besides being an extraordinarily slow and inefficient process, is that it doesn’t essentially solve the issue. Your inbox will still look more like a telephone directory, and the next time you come to sort the matter out, you will end up re-reading many of the messages you read before – wasting yet more time.

Filing emails as you go along is a much better plan. Nobody tries to climb a mountain by jumping straight to the top, or even making the climb in one go. Instead, a little and often is the best approach here. By creating a few folders, filing emails that you have replied to into one folder, messages from certain people in others, and deleting those that are no longer relevant, you can begin to identify some order amongst the chaos.

An organized inbox is a rare thing, and is an enormous help when it comes to your overall Outlook productivity, but it is only by religiously keeping on top of the folder systems that you will retain control over your online communications. Whichever way you choose to keep your inbox organized is up to you, but success will only come if the system you use is easy and simple.

Thankfully, there is a company offering a fourth solution. This takes the idea of folders and automates the process for you, dramatically speeding up the whole process. MoveIT is an add-on specifically designed to work with Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to create a large number of dynamic rules and filters. The add-on makes sure first of all that you read the emails as they come in to your inbox, but then as soon as you have read them, with just a click of the mouse, the selected emails are “magically” transported to the correct folders. By simplifying the whole process, the filing of emails can be kept on top of, rather than being so very quickly swamped.

This means that, once you have read the important emails, rather than ending up with one large inbox stuffed full of everything, if you are logging on to do work, you can view only those emails in your work folder, or a specific project folder. This means you will not be distracted by all the many irrelevant emails which have been directed into separate locations. Having said that, if you are logging on in your own time, and don’t want to be bothered by work messages, view only those in your friends or family folders. This way, you aren’t wasting your valuable time carrying out filing – after all, a computer is supposed to work for you, not be a cause of yet more work for yourself.

Those users who have tried a solution such as MoveIT have noticed the considerable amount of time saved each day. They have likened it to gaining an extra day each month. It’s still not quite as quick as hitting the delete key, but at least you’ll still have your job when it comes to enjoying that extra day.

More often then not I used to find myself working after hours (late into the night or early hours of the morning), answering emails, handling communications, catching up on technical readings.

You see, I get over 200 emails a day.

It wasn’t easy trying to handle the vast quantities of emails, during work hours. I still needed to run my department, manage the people, talk to clients, and trying to fit it all into 8/10/12 hours a day was becoming impossible.I have spoken to many people, some with as little as 20 emails a day who reported exactly the same symptoms.

We can’t manage our email overload, and the consequences are “killing” us. No family life, no outings, and it seemed like everything just revolved around email, email and more email.

I have tried many programs, implemented many system, and nothing worked. I seem to have spent my time reading the same email more then twice, trying to file the emails in the correct folders, leaving them in the inbox, deleting them, tried to use outlook rules and alerts, went to productivity seminars, and although the situation seems to have improved a bit, I was still spending a lot of my own, personal time on this information explosion. However, I did gain a lot of experience in the process and have spoken to hundreds of office workers and executives about the email overload problem.

I then sat and tried to analyzed the reasons that lead us to spending so much time.

There had to be a solution. A simple solution to email overload. It just didn’t make sense that nothing was available. In analyzing where I, and other email users, have gone wrong, we discovered some interesting facts:

1. People who leave their read/handled emails in the inbox, waste considerable amount of time, and “lose” a lot of emails.
2. People who file their emails in folders, were able to slightly increase productivity, but a proper system was lacking.
3. Outlook rules & alerts caused more problems then solutions.
4. When a users inbox was empty (or had very little emails), they seemed to be able to better handle their work overload.

Read about the solution to all these problems in my post about MoveIT or go straight to the email overload website.