It's time to take back control of your inbox

Remember when your inbox was filled exclusively with messages from friends and family? No? Been too long? Every year that passes I find my inbox filled with more and more junk. Data shows that only 42% of emails are important., meaning the majority of email in our inbox is unimportant! 

Stats about email:

•  The average person receives 110 e-mails per day.
• The average employee spends 650 hours per year processing unimportant email
• A case study conducted by the Danwood Group found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover from an email interruption and return to work 

While changing the way you think about and process e-mail is a great start, there’s a lot more that can be done to reduce email overload.

SaneBox is a well known email management tool among techies, CEOs and investors, but is starting to make a push into the mainstream. SaneBox analyzes your inbox and then with an unbelievable amount of accuracy filters your "unimportant" email into a separate folder called SaneLater and summarizes this email in a daily digest. This means your inbox is left with only important email.

They also offer a number of additional email productivity features, but my favorite is SaneReminders. Simply add a timeframe such as 3days@sanebox.com in the CC or BCC field when sending and email and if the recipient doesn’t respond within three days you’ll receive a notification. You can use any timeframe you desire (1day@sanebox.com, 27days@sanebox.com, Tuesday@sanebox.com, 5pm.Monday@sanebox.com). I use this feature on almost every email I send.

We’re all overloaded with email, there’s no way around it, but we can greatly reduce our pain with email by adhering to good habits and utilizing the tools around us. For me, SaneBox is the tool that has been in the most helpful, I'm still working on creating those good habits!