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.