There's one good habit that, if adopted, can reduce the clutter dramatically. I'll go out on a limb and say that this one technique, if adopted religiously, can reduce the size of your currently unmanaged inbox by as much as 80%.

I'll call it "plowing through" but that doesn't do it justice because there's actually rationale and logic behind it. Others refer to it as "just do it"; a take-off on the old Nike slogan.

And over-used attachments? Those are evil.

How are they evil?

Let me count the ways.

And yet we persist in treating as such.

Add to that the experience of getting an email on a topic you feel passionately about, and it's a recipe for a communications disaster.

I'm sure we've all been there. You're on a mailing list or in some kind of on-line discussion and someone says something that, to you, is outrageous - literally provoking outrage. You then experience an urge, a desire, a need, to respond, to respond before anyone else does, and to respond strongly to put that person in their place. Perhaps you want to point out the error of their ways and their thinking, and then perhaps move on to topics such as their parentage and personal hygiene.

And that's when all hell breaks loose.

I believe that 90% of your outgoing email should be in plain text format. Maybe more.

Why?

Aside from a collection of technical reasons I'll get to in a minute, it's simple really: you want people to focus on what you have to say, not how it looks. Lots of formatting, backgrounds, highlighting and using many different fonts and styles are all things that distract from your words. They're more about making your message "pretty" to look at, and rarely add value to your ideas.

I'm not saying never use HTML (or Rich Text) email, but I am saying default to using plain text and only use HTML email when you really need to, which is actually pretty rare.

Understanding that can be very, very freeing.

We'll look at this from two perspectives: what email delays can mean to you as a sender, and how understand that email can be delayed can affect how you work with email as a recipient.

That essay closed with a simple little statement:

So if you need a selfish argument, it's that only replying appropriately will, as a side effect, also reduce the amount of email you need to deal with as well.

Here's the gem hidden in that statement: it's not just about replies.

Or as the geekier folks often write it:

<AOL>
me too!
</AOL>

I really don't know what it is that causes it, but for some reason email seems to bring out the "me too" in many people. You know what I mean: you'll have a discussion, either one-on-one correspondence or more commonly an exchange on a mailing list, and at its close or at some other juncture, you'll get a completely content-free email or collection of emails from some of the participants.

Perhaps we feel the need to let people know we're listening. Perhaps it's the email equivalent of an head nod. The problem is, as I said, that it's otherwise completely content free. As a result, unlike an actual head nod, it's difficult to ignore. Someone must download it, read it, determine its value (if any), and then dispose of it.

Yes, I see people asking for spam.

It's like they're putting a large sign on their virtual backside saying "Spam Me! Please!"

Oh, they don't realize that they're asking for spam, and if you asked them if that's what they want, they'd probably say "No, Definitely Not!" in the strongest of terms. And yet, I'll claim, strongly, that they're doing so. Perhaps not intentionally, but they're asking for it.

Are you?

I just shake my head.

My advice?

Chill out, relax, get over it, and use the most under-used key on your keyboard.

I don't know about you, but I actually look at the Subject field first. Often before I even look at who the email is from.

Now, I can almost hear many of you already saying "Yeah, subject line, big deal. Whatever. It's not that important."

You are so wrong.

My guess is that even you look at the subject of the message (before or after seeing who it's from) before you do anything. I'll bet you immediately look at anything that sounds important, on-topic or relevant to your situation, and skip the rest - either for later, or for "when I get around to it", which is really just another way of saying "never".

Now imagine you're trying to get your email read by someone who's incredibly busy, and suffering form email overload because they haven't been reading Taming Email. What are they going to pay attention to first? The email whose subject line tells them clearly what the message is about.

It only makes sense.

Factoring in the "New Mail" sound of many email programs, it becomes Pavlovian - we hear the sound and like a well trained puppy we go check our email, interrupting whatever we were doing.

Who's controlling who? Or rather, what's controlling you?

At a conference a couple of years ago, a good friend made a simple suggestion had improved his productivity dramatically. You almost could feel the productivity of the room increase as others implemented his oh-so-simple suggestion.

So today I'm going to look at creating just one rule, the one rule I consider to be the most important rule you can have. So important that I'll call it The Golden Rule.

The popular Golden Rule goes something like this: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Our golden rule isn't really all that different, at least in intent. It's more along the lines of "Prioritize the people you know."

If I could have only one message rule, this would be it.

(I'm going to assume, for the moment, that your spam is taken care of elsewhere. Obviously in most cases, deleting spam is probably a goodly portion of what you're doing too. Dealing with spam, however, is a topic for another day.)

Wouldn't it be nice if you had someone to sort your email for you? Show you the email that's most important to you first? Perhaps even collect all those email newsletters for you to read and peruse later, when you had the time? Perhaps even completely filter out the email that you simply don't want to see?

Well, you already have such an assistant.

Inbox Rules.

Apparently a lot of my life revolves around email.

Unless you're a geek like me (and heaven help you if you are), you don't need a long list of email programs. You probably just need one. The right one, of course.

So which one do you need? And how do you choose from the tens or perhaps hundreds of other choices?

How do you choose what email program to use?

In short, I asked the senders to stop.