I’m a little late to the game on this, but last week Lifehacker pointed to an interesting post by Dan Markovitz on the root causes of email overload:
"For example, I’ve spilled a lot of electronic ink (fortunately, electrons are cheap) telling you how to manage email. But I’m now wondering whether my advice has merely been addressing the symptoms, and not the actual problem. Which is to say, I’m giving advice on how to handle email once it’s hit your inbox. But perhaps I should be focusing more on the root cause of all those emails."
Dan makes a good case for running more analysis on the content of email to see if you can help alleviate the problem before it gets to you.
Here’s my advice to Dan and anyone else who is looking to keep their Inbox leaner:
- Top five ways to reduce email traffic
- Eliminate carbon copy bloat
- Use Unsubscribe to keep unwanted email threads from hitting your Inbox
Read the comments on the LifeHacker post for more suggestions on tackling the problem.