The "I'm over-run by email" myth

Everyday I hear at least one person whining about the exploding volume of email and how onerous it is to "get through" all that email. Are you one of these people? Are you one of those folks that says proudly "I only process my email once a day or once every 2 hours" or "I'm not going to be a slave to my email" or some such thing?

You know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you?

This morning on NPR there was some guy who was proudly talking about the fact that he had some 32,000 unopened emails in his inbox. And how he's configured his email to show emails from his boss in red and emails from people that work for him in green and emails from his family members in pink....ok so I don't remember the exact colors but you get the point. This is just silliness. I get a lot of email and I process all of it with minimal delay. And no, I don't sit around all day doing nothing but email. C'mon...it doesn't really take that much effort to quickly process email. The fact is that only a very small percentage of the email that one receives requires any significant handling. It only takes a few seconds to scan an email to determine if needs to be deleted, responded to right away or in rare cases tagged to be responded to later. And NO...you shouldn't be spending any time cataloging all your email in to hundreds of useless email categories thinking that that will somehow help you find emails more easily in the future. Most likely you'll never look for an email again. If you must, just save off your emails by month and use advanced search to find the email you're looking for.

So quit that whining and deal with it. You'll actually end up saving time.