Ari Meisel is co-founder at Less Doing, where he works on making every task in life and business more efficient. You can follow him on Twitter @liontex and read his blog at arimeisel.com.  People spend a lot of time on email — way too much for their own good and productivity. Email is a disruptive technology that can take you on a tangent you never intended, and eat up time faster than most other voluntary activities.  Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly.  To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques.  To optimize email, you need less of it. Try using a service called Unsubscribe.com to get yourself removed from mailing lists, promotional emails, etc. It uses a Gmail plugin, or you can just forward emails to mail@unsubscribe.com.  Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don’t need to individually subscribe to Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast.  Next comes organization. I’m a huge fan of OtherInbox, which integrates with Gmail and automatically organizes your messages into folders like “Shopping” and “Business.” Imagine an inbox with 1,000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails — in one click. Furthermore, OtherInbox will learn from you, and therefore, get better over time. As an added benefit, OtherInbox has its own unsubscribe service. It will also automatically recognize tracking numbers in an email, then put the delivery date in your calendar alongside relevant shipment information.  Become a filtering ninja. Whether Gmail, Outlook or another service, most email systems allow for filtering. Any type of email you get with some regularity (and some you don’t) should have a filter assigned to it. Sometimes accounts forward emails with certain keywords to an assistant, or provide a specific automated response. Regardless, use filters often.  Answer questions ahead of time. Take away the need for people to email you in the first place. Try including an FAQ section on your website, for example. Answer those mundane, repetitive questions ahead of time. Or, try putting relevant information in your signature. I use UnityFax to get faxes by email. I like Virtual Post Mail to get postal mail in my email inbox.  Finally, use WiseStamp to generate nice little icons that link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog. I also like to include a link to Tungle in my signature, which gives people access to an appointment book synced with my calendar in real time. That way, I never have to waste time or emails setting up meetings.  Include a sentence in your email signature stating that you only check your email once a day, but if the matter is urgent, the sender can use AwayFind. This service creates an emergency contact page that routes messages to you by voice or text.  Now that you’ve optimized your emails, you’ll need to get better at “processing” them. Check out The Email Game, which adds game dynamics to email processing. When you get an email you have a few seconds to decide what to do: whether to defer it to a later time, delete it or reply to it. If you decide to reply, you have only a short time to craft your response. Depending on how well you do, the game rewards points, all the while training you to process email faster.  If you really want to geek out, go to Read Fast, which trains you, little by little, to speed read. I gained 30 words per minute after one article.  I use FollowUp.cc to keep track of deadlines within the email realm. It’s a simple concept: Whenever you send an email, you can set an email reminder for any time period. For instance, if you write an email to a potential client, you can choose to CC “3days@followup.cc.” Three days later, if that client hasn’t responded, he’ll get a reminder email, as will you. If you BCC “3days@followup.cc,” only you get the reminder. You’ll find that after a couple weeks of using FollowUp.cc, you’ll stop worrying about follow-ups. It’s out of sight, and out of mind — the way it should be.  Gmail plugin Canned Responses is indispensable. The plugin lets you create template emails. For example, if you frequently get requests for product information, you can create a template email with all the info. That way, it only takes two clicks to send, rather than five minutes spent writing the email. In combination with filters, you can set automatic template responses to certain keywords, completely removing the task from your plate.  Another great plugin is Boomerang. Among other things, the tool allows you to delay sending certain emails until a later date. Deferring emails makes you more productive by corralling people into your schedule. If you respond to an email immediately, you’ll likely just get more email. But, if you send at a more strategic time, you may be in a better position to deal with that message more efficiently.  The last tool in the automation process is an autoresponder. Your autoresponder should take the same route as your email signature by anticipating people’s needs and provide solutions beforehand. Tell them whom to contact for certain requests, and let them know where to get the information they want.  Once you’ve worked up the email ladder of optimization and automation, you will undoubtedly still be left with messages that require human interaction — but maybe not your own. That’s where virtual assistance comes into play. I use FancyHands to deal with nagging tasks I don’t have time for. Simply forward an email with one line of instructions. Then the service calls people to request information and organizes files into something more useful.  The most important thing to remember is that every problem has a solution. When you examine tasks within the framework above, you can get technology working for you, instead of the other way around  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock
Your inbox can be a trap, but there are some techniques you can employ to minimize the time suck of email.