Unfortunately, I only see things getting worse, for the reasons you mention. And hoping schools will catch and teach students how to manage the onslaught is, I hate to say it, very wishful thinking. Our schools, at all levels, do poorly at teaching students time management skills – we recognize the problem but don’t know how to fix it, as educators are often behind the technological curve to start with.

Pessimistic? Perhaps. But I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg as the whole world gets online.

On the flip side, I guess it’s job security for those of us trying to help people tame the Inbox!

I believe there are quite a few solutions that you can use to consolidate email inboxes. In the language of 2Time, it’s a way of putting all your Capture points together, which is a simple way of ensuring your peace of mind.

I agree that often email that is sent can disappear into the mist, and there are no programs that I know of that will prompt a user if an expected reply is not received. What a GREAT feature that would be!

I use a software called Promisystem that does what we are talking about with respect to promises that are made between people. It requires a very different way of thinking that’s not too hard to learn, but it effectively supplements email by managing the essential promises in a separate database.

I think that people don’t look at the things they choose to do, and instead focus on the email that comes as a result of their choices. Then they blame the sender…

I have had people blame me for sending them too much email, but they are the ones who signed up for different information products and they always have the option of decided to discontinue what they are receiving.

I think the mindset of “getting more” is different from the mindset of “limit the inputs so my life is more manageable.” The latter is more difficult to implement.

I started treating email like paper mail. I go over the new messages first with a mental junk mail (spam) filter. I mark all spam that is spam.

Then I go through the messages remaining for email that I don’t have to read and delete it immediately.

Then I go through the remaining messages and deal with each, whether they need a response, are FYI or whatever and file what I need to keep.

I also use this opportunity to unsubscribe from any list that isn’t relevant to me right now. I used to file that stuff for later, but realized later will never come. I unsubscribe and focus on what I need to work on now. I get relatively little personal email from people I actually know, so getting through messages is pretty easy for now.

The thing that’s starting to eat my time the most is having 3 mailboxes I have to actively monitor. Two are easy, but the third requires a log-out and another log-in to a different account. I need to find a technology solution for that Google problem. I think there is a Firefox addon for it. I’ll have to check. Once I get that problem solved, email will be a lot more manageable for me.

Unless the recipient has consistently demonstrated an acceptable turnaround time, I would suggest sending email without assuming it’s being read. Track needed responses on a Waiting For list, or tag/file the initial message with a similar label, noting the date the message was issued/