Wishing that people would stop emailing you?

Email has become one of the most successful ways of communicating with colleagues and friends across the globe, mainly due to its simplicity, speed, and above all, cheap cost. However, advertisers and marketers quickly caught on to these same advantages and as a result your clean inbox is now cluttered. Today it is rare not to be bombarded with miracle cures for almost anything you want increased. Subscriptions, reminders, confirmations, replies, personal, social and business – very quickly your organized inbox can become overloaded. Take a day or two off, and welcome to the world of email stress.

The many advantages of email as a communications medium have, for many people, turned into email overload, and spending time filing emails and cleaning inbox is time that could be spent doing far more profitable, or enjoyable tasks.

The problems facing people at this point are that emails which are urgent or critical in some way often get buried beneath a long list of other emails, and the very advantage of speed becomes negligible. It is too easy to ignore an email if it is swamped by scores of other messages. Very often, if the email was important, then follow up messages might find themselves winging their merry way to your cluttered inbox, only adding to the problem.

Some people’s solution to this is to have multiple email accounts. By doing this they can have work emails directed to a specific work account, social emails to another, subscriptions to a third, and so on. The theory sounds reasonable, but in practice the time taken to log in to each account individually and sift through the emails counters any time saved. Additionally, the temptation is to ignore one or two of the accounts, although very quickly this inbox is likely to fill up, and become an overwhelming task to sort out when the time eventually comes to do so.

For those people who use Microsoft Outlook, there are tools that can help, such as building in rules, filters and alerts. However, there is a problem here too, as many people have found. By designating a specific folder for all emails of a certain type, or from a particular company, they can effectively be ignored. As an email comes in, and gets diverted to a neat little folder, you are far less likely to notice that it has arrived at all!. Until it is too late, of course, and the sender would have been better off using snail mail instead. Whilst on the surface this might seem a good solution, Outlook productivity is likely to be diminished, rather than improved, and the email stress merely diverted temporarily. This is not really filing, it’s burying your head in the sand and hoping no one notices.

So, as a communications tool for the twenty first century, email has many advantages, but for the vast majority of its users, many disadvantages and pitfalls too. A tool which is designed to ease communications and speed up the process of sending and receiving information, the basics of digital housekeeping mean that the weak link in the system is the end user. Once the end user puts into practice the fine art of effective filing, or uses a software product such as MoveIT, email will continue to be an excellent theory, and a nightmare to keep on top of.

MoveIT is free to download (registration required), VERY easy to use and extremely intuitive. You can use MoveIT for free for 45 day!
(Click here to download)

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