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There is a popular phrase doing the rounds, "email overload" (and not to ignore its equally gregarious friend, "information overload"). It's a tired phrase that irritates me every time I see it used to scare somebody into doing something. The simple truth is that email overload is an illusion, and I can back that up with a simple question. Do you think the amount of real work you do each day is increasing? Do you really think that you, individually, produce more than your parents did in their generation? We are not overloaded by email in any real sense - we are not being forced to do any more actual work to meet our goals.

What email has changed is that it has got far easier - and cheaper - for people to send things to you. Which means they have no incentive to constrain themselves. Any ill thought out idea or request will be sent without hesitation, and you will reply equally haphazardly. Communication as a whole is far more wasteful, and what's being wasted is your time and ability to concentrate.

And email is a catch-all for all the different areas in our lives - multiple projects, social planning, entertainment... it's all lumped together in just one place.

The phrase "email overload" is suggestive of the wrong solution. We can't just turn it off, we can't just declare bankruptcy and delete it all... but we can separate it into small, easily-digested chunks.

One very powerful way to do this is by separating emails into projects, sub-projects and grouping them by priority. And, to deal with the volume, to frequently clear out the inbox and throwing out as much non-essential stuff as possible (archive, delete, 2-minute reply, etc.).

Essentially, you use ActiveInbox to split emails into multiple manageable streams. To stretch that water metaphor to breaking point, your inbox is like a raging river in the valley of a mountain, into which every mountain stream has run. The only way to achieve something useful with that river is to dam it up, and split into into multiple smaller streams that each take you to some desirable destination (I said that metaphor would be stretched!).

There is no need to abandon email, or ever declare "email bankruptcy", just get a new perspective - and the helper tools - that empowers you to manage your incoming emails with ease.

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