Over the past 10 years email has become one of the most utilised means of communication, in the office and the private. It is a fantastic way of corresponding, because you do not have to wait for the post to be collected and delivered and in many cases it's even better than the telephone, because you do not have to wait for the other person to be at their phone at the very same time.
Therefore it is quiet logical that the amount of emails in the past few years has increased dramatically. According to statistics by the Radicati Group from the first quarter of 2006 the number of emails sent per day to be around 170 billion - thereof 70% are spam or viruses!
This relentless bombardment of one email after another on a day-to-day basis results in distraction, stress, addiction and over all in reduced productivity at the workplace. Each new email brings you off focus and away from your important projects and tasks. This problem does not only effect large organisations where the normal workforce gets between 100 and 250 emails a day. All the professional people, business owner and self employed with 50 emails per day are facing the same problems. The cost for the whole Australian economy in lost productivity is far beyond 10 billion dollar.
If you want to work proactively on your business and on your projects you must change your habits. Otherwise you end up doing the real work after hours and spending the day only to respond to seemingly urgent but not really important messages.
One of the main reasons for this email addiction is the lack of training. When emails started to sneak into our lives about ten years ago it was so easy to send and receive an email. So literally nobody took the time to learn the basics of those programs. During the years this hasn't changed, but the environment has changed dramatically (see above) and the software tools are much more powerful and sophisticated today.
Three important tips to save you time
Here are three tips you can apply today to detach yourself from your inbox and give the control over your messages back to you
1. Use rules and folders. .
First you create a folder with the person or projects name on it. Then you simply make a right click on the actual message, and chose "create rule". Here you decide which folder you want this and all following emails to go into. You see, a Rule is really just the direction you want your incoming message to go. It by-passes the Inbox and arrives straight into the folder. The bold title and the number in brackets shows you how many unread items you have in each folder.

2. Turn on manually send and receive
Instead of automatically download every message that's waiting for you and distracting you, from now on you are in control when to look for new emails. And besides getting back into control of your inbox there is a secondary gain: now you can review an email before it's really leaving your computer. That might save you some important relationships.
To turn on the manual send and receive you simply go to the Tool-Options-Menu and look for Mail Setup.
3. Sort out SPAM before it reaches your inbox
You can either use the Junk-Mail-Folder in Outlook® 2003 or buy yourself a useful program like Mailwasher. The principle is the same in both programs: every incoming email is black-listed by default and you learn the system by white-listing your contacts and friends. An additional tip concerning SPAM: do not leave your email address visible on your website - hide it behind a form or link.
Master Your Inbox
If you want your system running with German precision you might consider to learn more about Outlook® or Outlook Express®. We are not only delivering enjoyable courses, workshops and presentation we have also developed an unique email-course "Master Your Inbox".