Put your inbox on a diet: obese inboxes are unhealthy for their owners (and the economy). They take longer to manage, are unstable and make it harder to find important e-mails. Time and energy is wasted unnecessarily. Here are seven ways to slim down your inbox for 2008:

Handle each e-mail once, using the 4Ds principle — and do one of the following: Deal with it there and then; Delegate it; Defer action (letting the sender know when to expect a reply); or Delete (if it is ephemeral and not needed as a business record).

Develop a foolproof process for keeping track of deferred e-mails (eg, flags, brought- forward folder, automatically create a task, etc).

Unsubscribe from all external newsletters that you don’t read. Don’t just delete them, as that wastes time and storage space.

Remove yourself from all those unnecessary internal (and external) “cc” lists. Remember, it’s your inbox, so be ruthless about what you allow in.

Talk first, e-mail second. Often it is far more effective to talk rather than generating countless e-mails that still don’t resolve the matter (many organisations now promote e-mail-free periods). If you talk to someone and they ask you to e-mail them, be brazen and ask why. Maybe they are using e-mail to cover up their shortcomings, so ask “when would it be convenient to talk?”

Housekeep your inbox at least once a week. Little and often is far better than waiting until you receive the dreaded “you are over the limit” message. Delete old e-mails that don’t constitute a formal business record, and empty the deleted file. (Set this as the automatic/default for when you close down.) If you have no dedicated archiving software, do your own archiving using the built-in functions (in Outlook or Notes, etc).

Avoid asking for and replying to “read receipt” requests. They are a waste of time and merely signal an air of mistrust and playing politics. Receipt of an e-mail does not mean that it has been properly read and actioned.

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