A consistent theme through many of the conversations I have regarding productivity, work/life balance and time management focuses on the never-ending deluge of emails that many of us are receiving nowadays.  In addition to more and more email piling in, we’re being expected to and judged by how fast we can respond to said emails.

This is a constant battle that I fight on a daily basis.  The first thing I do when my alarm goes off is grab my iPhone and check what emails have come in over the past few hours.  This continues throughout the rest of the day and ends with a last check of my iPhone right before placing it back on the nightstand where I grabbed it at the start of the day.  I know, I know, the productivity cops are coming after me as we speak for saying the first thing I do is check email.  For me, it helps to set the pace for the day and allows me to prioritize the morning especially if something happened with a client.  On any given day I receive 200-300 emails and send upwards of 100+ emails per day.  Between my laptop, iPhone, and iPad, I ensure that I’m consistently plugged in and attempting to stay on top of my inboxes.

Of course, sometimes I fall off the wagon and fall deeply, deeply behind where I have to spend an entire day catching up.  Whenever this happens, I tend to fire up Merlin Mann‘s famous “Inbox Zero” talk.  Have you seen it before?  If not, check out the video below.  Though it is about an hour long, it is worth every second of your time, especially if you’re having problems organizing or keeping up with your inbox.

What I’ve found is that I can’t use the exact folders that Merlin suggests because I find that when I tried using a “Defer” and/or “Do” folder, I never followed up with the emails.  Also, after trying out a few different folder structures, I decided that what helped me process (and reference) email the fastest was to use the following folders for my primary inbox, which happens to be my New Marketing Labs account:

• External – this is for all communications that are not from a client or someone on the New Marketing Labs team.
• Clients – all client emails go into this folder.
• Internal – any email from a New Marketing Labs team member is kept in this folder.
• Misc. – any email that doesn’t nicely fit into one of the other folders or may be a personal note that I want to save for personal reference is stored here.
• Travel – because of how much I travel, I’m always receiving travel confirmations, updates and changes. Though I heavily depend on TripIt to keep my travel organized, I keep all backups here.

This allows me to quickly decide where an email needs to be stored instead of spending 5 seconds per email deciding exactly which of 100 folders it needs to go in.  It also helps me with trying to locate a reference email because of how fast email searches are nowadays and the variety of ways that your email can be sorted.

This is just how I attempt to slay the inbox.  How do you handle your email?

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Photo Credit: Christopher S. Penn

This was originally posted over on the New Marketing Labs blog. I thought you’d find the upcoming webinar useful too so I wanted to share it here.  I hope that you can join us!

Are you desperately trying to figure out where your email marketing and social media efforts come together to form a seamless digital marketing strategy?
If you’re nodding your head up and down as fast as you can then we’re here to help!  On Wednesday, May 12th at 2:00p EST I’ll be hosting a webinar along with DJ Waldow of Blue Sky Factory to yap about new media strategy and how social media and email marketing can work together.

During the webinar you’ll:

• Gain an understanding of the new media market and its benefits
• Learn why email marketing is the digital glue and how it easily integrates with social media
• Take away strategies and tools for measuring results and using them to optimize future campaigns
• Have access to examples of real-world marketers using these channels effectively
• Walk away feeling EXCITED about email marketing and social media

What makes me so excited for this webinar is how passionate and knowledgeable DJ and the entire team over at Blue Sky Factory is when it comes to email marketing.  Every time I chat with anyone from their team or hear them speak at our events or other conferences, I always learn something new.

So, will you join DJ and I from the comfort of your office, bed or local coffee shop for our webinar on 5/12 and come chat all things email marketing and social media?

Make sure you bring your questions, problems and confusion with you to the webinar and we’ll do our best to deal with everything you can throw at us.  Let’s just make sure it’s about email marketing and we’ll be fine.  Deal?

Photo Credit: tiny banquet committee

1. This is possibly due to topics that are covered around here and the subscriber that attracts.
2. It could be that many of you feel overburdened with email and therefore do not want yet another email to have to read on a daily basis.
3. Some may not like providing their email address due to a fear of spam and feel that if they subscribe via RSS it is easier to opt-out.

For those that are in the 3rd bucket, I can assure you that on this blog your email is held confidential (see my pledge to you on my Newsletter page).  But, I can understand the hesitance to provide your email address especially since every big box retailer, restaurant chain or other business asks for your email address.

I only subscribe to a couple blogs via email, mostly blogs that I manage to ensure that everything is working properly.  There are only a few others that I subscribe to via email because they provide a daily digest of the news within the vertical that they cover.  Otherwise, and more often, I prefer to subscribe via RSS.  Currently, I’m subscribed to 200+ blogs and read, in general, between 400-600 articles per day.  If I was to subscribe to even a portion of these blogs via email, I would have a full inbox at the start of the day before business and personal emails began to fly in.

Where do you fall?  Do you prefer to subscribe via RSS or email to blogs?  If you use both methods, what factors weigh in your decision?

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Photo Credit: HubSpot