I'm a Madman!

I dare you to find someone more obsessive about email than I am.

I treat my inbox like a man with a mallet trying to knock down the furry moles in the arcade game, whack-a-mole.

As soon a new email sticks its head up, it is my goal to deal with it: either delete it, file it in a folder, or respond to it.

I am so nuts that I almost feel physically ill if I open Outlook and see a long line of new messages. The worst is when I can't decide what to do with one of them and I opt to keep it right there to taunt me.

It's with those things in mind that I sympathize with people and companies looking to get a handle on email gone wild. Fast Company had an article in the current issue about how various companies are "whacking the moles" that chew into their productivity.

They say that the average corporate email account receives 18 MB of stuff daily, and that number is expected to grow to 28 MB a day by 2011.

Capital One deals with that crushing tsunami by putting employees through an email management workshop, and it estimates that it saves 11 workdays a year. Some of the keys to their training is teaching employees to write more specific subject lines, using bullet points, underlining, and bolding.

Union Bank tames its email moles by using RSS feeds so that all of its 10,000 employees don't get every email. A new system (called KnowNow) will send RSS feeds based on job description and location.

Finally, Rueters uses a hybrid system of email and instant messages to keep the inboxes from overflowing.

Anybody out there have any personal strategies that work for you? Personally, I will just keep my handy mole-smashing mallet of a delete key at the ready for Option Number One.