Meet with your co-workers to discuss ways in which e-mail traffic can be reduced for everyone in your work group. That may mean avoiding sending nonessential messages, not sending "OK, thanks" notes that simply acknowledge receipt of a message, picking up the phone or walking to a co-worker's cubicle when a subject is best handled in a conversation.
Distractions
Respect your co-workers' time and attention. Remember that notes sent to them may distract them from important tasks.
Management
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, August 02, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 92 words Type of Material: Correction
E-mail: An article in Thursday's Section A about a backlash to e-mail said that the research firm Basex calculates that unnecessary e-mail and instant messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day, and that this did not include "recovery time." The worker's recovery time -- the time it takes to resume work at the point it was interrupted -- is actually included in the 28%. In addition, the article stated that Basex's calculations will be reported in a study to be published in October. The study was published in 2005.
Use e-mail as a to-do list. This may seem counterintuitive, but according to a 2006 study at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, e-mail management techniques such as this "may moderate the relationship between e-mail volume and feelings of e-mail overload." In other words, it won't directly help your e-mail problem, but it will create feelings of control.
Privacy
Don't publish your complete e-mail address on blogs and other Web pages. Instead of yourname@server.com, use yourname "at" server.com or yourname (at) server.com. That way, robots that crawl the Web looking for e-mail addresses to spam won't detect you -- at least until they figure out that people are using "at" or (at).
Surrender
If all else fails, consider declaring e-mail bankruptcy.
