Taking Back Your Inbox – the E-mail Dilemma
April 5, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
Jeremiah Owyang started a good discussion about the love-hate relationship so many of us have with e-mail.
It’s a crucial tool for work and our private lives. Yet, more often than not, we find ourselves held hostage by the always-overflowing Inbox. Some days, I feel just like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia – drowning in the success of a time-saving tool.
Something needs to change. Jeremiah thinks the solution lies partly in processes and partly in the use of tools.
I’m still a prisoner to my Inbox, and it’s my own damn fault. I’ve managed to automatically move a bunch of alerts and notices to the appropriate folders. 
But now I never visit those folders. I used to find some really interesting tidbits in those e-mail notices. But I’m tempted to just cancel all the alerts and start from scratch.
The benefit of using Gmail as my main e-mail service is the quick and easy search function. Keeping my e-mails properly sorted and archived is great, but if my organizing system fails me, I can always just do a quick search.
Not great if you search for “news release,” or your name, but a key word search has often saved me from a long and possibly fruitless journey through my folders.
Jeremiah asked readers to pitch in with their e-mail overload solutions, and there are some good suggestions among the 64 responses.
Some tools: GTD Inbox for Gmail, Google Mail Trends, Clear Context, Xobni and Away-Find.
Processes: Inbox Zero, 3X/Day Inbox, E-mail Bankruptcy Solutions.
(Photo courtesy Jeremiah Owyang. Illustration courtesy my Inbox and Photoshop.)
I still would prefer having 3 emails. One for general communication, one for clients, and one for public sites. Hopefully, they would minimize mix-up.
We all feel trapped, yet we keep on fueling the endless cycle.
For once, being the LAST guy in a comment thread got me noticed.
Eric, thanks for trudging through all 64 responses to Jeremiah’s post. (Unless you just skimmed to the bottom, and that’s okay too. The Last shall be First, and the First shall be Last.)
Good analysis Eric. The key seems to be to set others’ expectations about turnaround and execute on that expectation.