I felt a bit embarrassed while admitting to my troubles managing my email. Since that post, I have had several interesting conversations with people about the problem of email and what a massive time suck dealing with email has become for all of us.

A friend I admire as one of the most driven, organized, on-top-of-it people around told me her email stresses her out daily and that checking email has become an unhealthy obsession. Every time her iPhone chimes, an angel looses its wings.

A vendor called today to get the pricing information she had requested twice by email. She said, “Its frightening how quickly that very important thing at the top of my email gets pushed down the list.”

A presenter today acknowledged 10,000 messages in her email inbox. I hope that wasn’t an exaggeration. I wanted to shake her hand. Or buy her a drink.

Here’s the problem I see: we have all somehow arrived at the conclusion that email is our job, that email is what we do. Somewhere along the line, I swallowed the belief that every email needs to be acknowledged, that there is a prize for how well or completely we deal with our messages. Email is the first communication we reach for yet is also the communication most likely to be lost, unread or deleted without consideration. Why do we expect everyone else to read our email when we do not always read all of their’s?

Tanya Joosten today described the problem as a noise and signal problem. Classic communication theory: the more noise there is on a channel, the greater the chance of signal loss. Truth.

So what’s the remedy? I’m still working on that.

In the meantime, my battle continues. I have tried to keep a clean inbox. No luck. At present there are still 48 emails received since May 1 that seem to require some action or acknowledgment on my part.

Email is a pain in the butt. There, I said it. I hate email.

I haven’t blogged in a few weeks because I’ve been really busy with projects at work. I’ve been busy juggling several big projects, traveling a bit and going to lots and lots of meetings. I’m not complaining about that. The past few weeks I have done my best to keep up with the important things but have intentionally let the smaller things go. That includes email — lots and lots of email.

For the past two or three weeks, I have fallen into the habit of skimming my email for important messages from members of my team, students, people I work with directly and anyone seeking my assistance directly. I haven’t been reading vendor emails, webinar invites, project summary updates, publisher advertisements and TOC updates. I have been letting these emails stack up, unread in my already full inbox.

It all finally caught up with me.

Last week I was checking my email while at a conference. A friend leaned over my shoulder, noticed the 687 unread emails badge on my email folder and said, “Dude, you have over 600 unread email messages! That’s awesome!”

I didn’t feel awesome. I felt embarrassed. I felt tired. I felt a bit angry. So, I made a promise. No more stacking up unnecessary emails. I aspire to keep a clean email inbox. All the productivity literature advises the following on incoming emails: Deal with it; Delegate it; Delete it.

Easy, right? Not quite.

First, I had to deal with the rat’s nest that my inbox had become. So I did a bit of triage. I cordoned off my inbox. Everything older than April got shipped into  a separate folder to be dealt with later. To start, I would only deal with the current month. The goal is to winnow down my emails from the current month until I am left with a clean inbox to work from. I still have about 70 emails that need to be dealt with, filed or forgotten. I have only 4 unread messages at the moment.

I’m a piler. My office is the same. I have stacks of mid-level importance stuff piled up on my desk waiting patiently for my attention. Since I can’t pile emails, I flag them. My Outlook inbox is a parade of flags billowing patiently, waiting for me to deal with, delegate or delete. Some of the emails require a conversation. Some require recording some information someone else. Several require reading. Many are diverse threads of a single conversation.

I’m working through my rules. I need to be ruthless in my discipline. I want to be merciless in my digital housekeeping.

The trouble is they keep rolling in. Yesterday I received 57 new emails and sent 25. Today I received 67 and sent 27. This is a pretty light week, so far.

Please help. I am under attack. This is a full-scale assault.

Emails are a messages in bottles. I am the man on the beach. I keep throwing the bottles back out to sea but they keep washing up on me.

Here are my new rules for merciless email management:

• Don’t flag emails for later reading. If they are articles, read them now or push them to Instapaper for easier offline reading.
• Delete all previous emails from a threaded conversation. Keep only the most recent.
• Don’t save emails to which I have replied. I can find the email later in my sent messages file.
• Keep emails short, focused, to the point.
• Don’t read emails that waste my time.
• Don’t read emails that require me to open an attachment to understand what they are about.
• Don’t email drafts of documents to others for editing. Use Google Docs.
• Move emails that require a scheduled event directly to the calendar for safe keeping.
• Unsubscribe to anything that does not immediately benefit me.

This will be an ongoing campaign, I’m sure. I want to keep a clean inbox. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What rules work well for you in keeping email under control?