By Jacqueline Nunes

Here’s some news. Are you sitting down — away from your computer? Every day, 183 billion e-mails are sent worldwide, landing in the inboxes of 1.1 billion users. For many people with an e-mail account, that translates into 166 e-mails popping up daily. If they ignore their e-mail for a week, they’ve suddenly got 1,162 messages clogging their inbox. What happens if they let things slide for an entire month? “I’ve seen upwards of 5,000 e-mails in an inbox at one time,” says Krista Green, a Vancouver-based professional organizer. If you’re having trouble breathing, you’re not alone. Out-of-control inboxes may induce stress and anxiety, but they’re also fixable. So swivel your chair over and boot ‘er up. Here’s how to approach the onslaught, and beat it.

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR OUTLOOK
A bulging inbox can be overwhelming because of sheer volume, but also because the majority of us are visual thinkers who respond to colours, symbols and shapes. These elements are non-existent in e-mail programs. Reimagine your e-mails as envelopes containing letters. How would you file them? “Would you let the letters dropped through your mail slot collect on the floor day after day?” asks Linda Chu, a professional organizer in Vancouver.

HOW TO SET UP A SYSTEM
There are three standard organizational tools in most e-mail programs — folders, rules and flags — and an infinite number of ways to use them. “If you push a system on someone,” says Yuval Eldar, a computer consultant in Montréal, “they’ll never keep at it. It has to make sense to them.” Instead, Eldar works one-on-one with his clients to create folders and subfolders that match the nature of their needs, into which messages can be placed manually. That way, everything has a spot.

Your e-mails can also be sorted automatically using the “rules” function on your e-mail program. This give you the option of having certain e-mail addresses or subjects routed directly into a designated folder. For example, if you receive an e-mail from beauty-tips@heygorgeous.com, it will automatically be directed into a folder called “Beauty Tips,” skipping your inbox entirely. Nifty, eh? Although most of the pros work with Microsoft Outlook, all of the popular e-mail programs have this capability.

Flags are like a virtual highlighter. Use them to draw attention to individual e-mails you don’t want to forget about. “I like flagging the e-mails in my inbox that have to be answered by more than one word,” says Susan Portnoy, a professional organizer who works with Eldar.

Outlook’s flags are multi-coloured; Portnoy suggesting using different shades for different tasks (blue for errands, yellow for people you have to call back and so on).

Or, for the most streamlined inbox crusader, reject flags entirely, and follow Krista Green’s radical approach: Build three time-sensitive folders into your inbox, called End of Day, End of Week and End of Month. “Your brain thinks Urgent, Not Urgent,” she says.

HOW TO DIG RIGHT IN
You’ve got your new system, but wait. What about those 5,000 e-mails you started with? “There’s no magic,” says Eldar, “You just have to take a weekend and go at it.” But there are smart ways that can save your time. Eldar suggests organizing your inbox by sender, so you can reply to (or file) all the e-mails from a single person in one folder, rather than jumping back and forth between different senders. The ultimate goal is to empty that inbox. Not ready to take the plunge? Chu offers a quicker fix: She sets up folders in the inbox according to year, then drags e-mails into them, hundreds at a time. Yes, you’ll have to go through those e-mails eventually, but at least your inbox is empty now.

HOW TO SCHEDULE POWER HOURS
“I hate it when people feel compelled to check their e-mails every 20 minutes,” says Portnoy. She strongly recommends scheduling uninterrupted blocks of time (of at least half an hour) every day for dealing with e-mails. “We almost get ADD as a society,” laments Green, whose own Power Hours take place first thing in the morning, just before lunch, mid-afternoon and in the evening. Outside of her Power Hours, Green quits her e-mail program entirely. “You actually get things done,” she says. You could even add your Power Hour times to your voicemail message, “so that there isn’t that immediate expectation of response,” says Chu.

HOW TO GET RID OF SPAM
Of the 183 billion e-mails being sent daily, 70 per cent are spam. Beyond the spam filter: if you have to list your e-mail address on a website, where it’s an easy target for spammers, garble it a bit. Try overloaded(at)home(dot)com instead of overloaded@home.com.

HOW TO CONSOLIDATE YOUR FILES
Keep one set of folders on your computer for sorting both e-mails and other documents. “A lot of people have e-mail folders that mirror the ones on their hard drive,” says Green, “but then when you go looking for an e-mail or file, you have to look in two different places.” Saving your e-mails in folder on the hard drive gives you just one place to look. So, for instance, if you’re a real estate agent, you can keep all those photos, emails and general documents about that old fixer-upper on Chestnut Road in the same spot.

HOW TO EASE YOUR MIND: DON’T DELETE
“This completely calms my clients down,” says Green, who recommends never emptying your Deleted Items folder. You can search and sort through your Deleted Items folder; back it up to your hard drive and you’ll never lose an e-mail again.