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Wrestling with that email in-box

Anyone who receives email will find this piece in the IHT resonates with them:

"Since e-mail became a fixture in our professional and personal lives, many academic researchers have investigated the complex mix of feelings brought on by the technology.

We feel guilty about being late in responding, about our in-boxes being disorganized, about the tens of thousands of unread messages that we're sure we'll never get to. What is it about e-mail that consumes us — that invades every corner of our personal space, demands ever more sophisticated methods of organization, and makes us wish for extra hours in the day to deal with the deluge? More important, how can we overcome it?

In the last few weeks, I set about finding a cure for e-mail anxiety. It was not the first time I'd done so; I've been looking for better ways to handle my mail since shortly after logging in to my first in-box.

Over the years, I've discovered many methods that worked for a while, but never permanently. For a while, I set up elaborate filters meant to automatically categorize every incoming message according to who sent it. Another time, I instituted a complicated system of color-coded labels aimed at getting me to understand which e-mail messages I had to respond to, which I had to save and which I could ignore.

But eventually every finely honed trick to tame my mail would collapse, and I'd backslide into a messy, undisciplined in-box. So in my search for a new way to deal with e-mail, I followed one guiding principle: Keep it simple. Any method that made too many demands on my time or my brain was bound to fail."


Here are the rules Fahrad Manjoo puts forward.

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