I receive a fairly insane number of emails a day, and have always been rather slow in responding to them. I’ve recently started getting much better, however, and wanted to quickly share what works for me in case it helps anyone else.

1. Get a good spam filter. I use Knowspam.net – as I check email on both my computer and phone, I wanted something server-side. It’s a challenge/response system, so literally no spam gets through. I loaded up my address book when I joined, and it scans my outgoing mail for new addresses, so only people who have never emailed me before and have never received an email from me are hit with an authentication request, and then only the first time. Having something automatically separate the wheat from the chaff makes wading through all the email I receive merely extremely tough, rather absolutely impossible.

2. Read the emails you receive. If any require less than two sentences of response, or absolutely require immediate attention, reply as soon as you read them. Doing so guarantees you respond to the time-sensitive messages in a timely manner, and it keeps easy ones from piling up.

3. Make a ‘reply’ folder, and move everything else there. Your inbox then stays clean, making it easy to triage incoming mail.

4. When you have some free time, pull up the reply folder and start working through the messages one by one, bottom up. That is, open the oldest email, and reply to it before going on to the next. This keeps you from saving the hard-to-write ones, saving them even longer, and then realizing you’ve gone weeks or months without replying to them.

5. If you find the reply box is getting particularly full, and you have a laptop, I find it helps immensely to get out of the office (or home workspace) and head to a coffee shop or restaurant instead, as it reduces all the possible procrastination-friendly distractions to a bare minimum. Plop down somewhere, and do nothing but chip away at the reply folder.

6. Another quick time saver: don’t save old emails in specific folders or categorize them or whatever else. Just delete everything, but set Outlook (or whichever program you’re using) to archive rather than delete the mail in your ‘deleted items’ folder, and set the archive date out eight or twelve months. This way, you can sort by sender and quickly find specific exchanges by skimming the list of emails from that sender; or, if you can’t remember who sent it, you can always search for the content the email contained. Either way, it’s likely faster than devising and sticking to an elaborate system of folder categorization.

Between these six things, I’m starting to feel like I’m no longer drowning in emails – now I’m only, say, neck deep. Still, that’s a big improvement. Try it out, and see if it works for you.