The video above shows an interview of efficiency expert Julie Morgenstern saying that you shouldn’t check email in the morning. Although others have suggested this, including Tim Ferriss, I can’t say I’ve successfully tried it to the point that it was permanent.

How often do you check email? Do you find any difference in your productivity when you check your email first thing in the morning when you get to work?

This is part 2 of “How I Freed Myself from Mountains of Email“.

After killing off spam and miscellaneous notifications, I did a few more things that are helping me get less email everyday.

Modified Email Rules and Alerts. Incoming mail is now organized based on criteria I set such as the sender (is it a client? relative? affiliate network?) and these criteria help me file email in the proper folders and deal with them there. If, at any given time, I just want to focus on one thing (replying to relatives, greeting clients, or invoicing), I just go to the right folder and find myself dealing with only relevant information.

Killed off an email address. One of my email addresses is too long, informal, and was created when I was in highschool. The only email I get there is either spam or personal messages from highschool friends and some family. I sent a generic email to everyone saying that I will no longer be using that address, and pointed them off to my more commonly used address. I also set up an autoresponder to say the same thing. Now, I check one less email address each day.

Hired a virtual assistant. This new assistant deals with my freelance work emails and customer service. Again, one less email address to check each day. Plus, my clients are probably much happier since someone is always replying to them and dealing with their concerns - something I didn’t get to do when I’m busy. Plus, replying to client emails took so much time that I focused less on the actual work. Now, my VA just sends me a daily summary on incoming emails and how she responded to each. This also helps me learn how to delegate - something that I am usually so afraid to do.

Created a fresh, new, super private email address. When I’ve worked out all the kinks in my system (within this month), this will be the ONLY email address I’ll check. Only very close friends, family, and my VA (the daily reports) can send me emails through this address. Why? Because these are the only people I want to hear from personally, and the only people I want to reply to personally.

My system isn’t perfect, but it’s a big step to better email efficiency. I used to spend at least 3 hours on email tasks alone, and now they don’t even take an hour to complete. Plus, my stress levels have gone down dramatically. That, to me, is the most important result.

How much time do you spend on email daily? How many emails do you receive on an average day? How many of those emails are spam? If anyone has any email efficiency tips or stories to share, please share them with us in the comments.

Image by Lusi, taken from stock.xchng

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” - Marshall McLuhan

Too much email can cause insanity. If you think information overload is restricted to your email server and client, you’re either mistaken or a much freer person than I am. Emails, whether they’re spam or not, take up so much of our time - from checking to reading and the thoughts and worries that linger after reading them.

The truth is, I’ve had enough. I no longer wish to be a slave to email! And I think I’m succeeding. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

Tightened spam protection. I made my spam protection cruel. As in take-no-prisoners type of cruel. My Outlook add-ins were good, but the spam was filtered and removed after it showed up on my inbox. So I would still look at it and watch if there were false positives, although false positives never happened. Instead, I went on the server itself and tweaked the spam filters from there to prevent me from receiving spam in my inbox at all. I did make a whitelist of domains to avoid any false positives.

Unsubscribed email notifications from all social networking sites. From now on, any updates, messages, pokes, or whatever coming in from my social network memberships (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) will be viewed on-site, and not via email. It is rare that someone contacts me through these sites, and I really don’t want to receive notifications about who updated their blog, asked a question, or poked me. If this is too drastic for you, most social networking sites allow for a great deal of flexibility when it comes to email notifications - you can be selective about what you receive.

Removed all email notifications from my blogs. This includes personal blogs. Why? Because I write on these blogs regularly anyway, so I can moderate comments and trackbacks before or after I write a post.

Modified mailing list subscriptions. I either unsubscribed to mailing lists I don’t read or opted to view messages via the web rather than in my Inbox. For important mailing lists (re: work), I just opt to receive weekly or daily digests - depending on email frequency.

These are just four steps I took to complete email management. Read on for part 2 of this post.

How to keep your inbox squeaky clean. A video presentation from Merlin Mann of 43Folders.