Brevity – keep it simple!
For most messages, particularly those that you would really like the recipient to pay attention to, aim for one screenful or less. This means cutting out unnecessary phrases, and thinking carefully about what you want to say. Be careful with internet abbreviations, which are not always universally understood and can cause more confusion than they are worth in saved keystrokes!

Keep your “cc’s” to a minimum
In general, when you CC more than three or four parties in your email, you’re signalling to most of the recipients that they can safely ignore your message. Think carefully about who needs to be “in the loop” – practice NOT contributing to the glutting up of other people’s inboxes!

Practice “Triage”
Triage is the practice of quickly looking over a bunch of items and allocating them according to priority. First, eliminate the mundane. Delete everything you don’t need! Then, park the ones that you can’t or don’t have to deal with immediately, either by filing them, or putting them in a holding folder. Finally, deal with those that require quick to immediate action. Remember also that it is often faster to respond quickly to “easy” messages, even if they aren’t urgent, than it is to park them and then deal with them later.

Stock Your Messages
Keep a folder of “stock messages”, or templates, in your email program – ones that you can quickly pull up and use to save yourself the time of composing similar messages over and over again (to answer similar questions over and over, for instance). You can also set your computer to auto-respond – not only when you’re on vacation, but at other times, like when you’ve recently returned from travelling and want people to know that they can expect to hear from you by the end of the week. It shows that you are responsive, and is a lot better than making people wait and wonder whether they will ever hear from you.

Work Offline
Consider NOT checking your email immediately upon arriving at the office. When you log on first thing, you’re automatically compelled to pay attention to what’s new, current, or tugging at your time and attention. Whatever you had planned ends up taking second place to the new tasks you feel obligated to perform. What if you waited for a couple of hours, and took care of the things you had identified as priority tasks first?

Consider also taking some time to look through what is still sitting in your inbox from the previous day, BEFORE you hit “check new messages”. Take some time to deal with outstanding issues, before inviting new ones into your inbox!

Use Filters
The fewer unwanted email messages you see, the more effective you’ll be at responding to those that merit a response! Use filters to deal with spam, listserve traffic, and even messages from certain senders.

Try the 6 D’s

1. Discard it. Delete it as soon as you receive it, if you can.
2. Delegate it. Forward it to someone else who can deal with it.
3. Do it. Respond to the email and then delete it.
4. Dungeon it. File it somewhere where you can retrieve it again if you need to.
5. Don’t see it again. Get off the mailing list if you don’t want to be on it.
6. Decide. When are you going to deal with it? 
   

Even if you don’t decide to implement all the suggestions offered here, it is worth taking some time to evaluate how efficiently you are using email. Who’s in control – you or your email? Consider some ways that you can make it into a useful tool, rather than a time-sucking burden.