Slogging Through Hundreds of Emails a Day?

ClearContext's Deva Hazarika receives hundreds of emails every day. He also works for an email management software company. Together those put him in a unique position to offer advice on how to handle your email so you don't get overloaded by the onslaught.

Here's some of his advice, along with some of my own.

• Deva's day starts with a look at the calendar. Good advice, though I often forget this step and instead wait for alerts to let me know what's shaking that day.
• Deva then starts on the least important stuff first: Sales reports, newsletters, random junk that can be quickly dispatched. I find that at least half of my inbox can be easily dispatched by quickly scanning for stuff that I can delete or file away permanently.
• Next comes the "quick responses." Deva spends 10-15 minutes responding to those emails which can be dealt with in a quick sentence or two. (This is probably when Deva responds to my emails, actually.) You can usually tell from the sender and the subject line whether a message is going to take more than a few seconds of thought to deal with.
• Now we're down to real work. Deva follows the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) system fairly rigorously here and creates task items and appointments for any major remaining items. These are small tasks, and GTD encourages the creation of these microsteps, essentially so you'll feel like you're accomplishing something. Here's where I break from GTD and Deva's strategy. For ongoing tasks (blog posts I need to write, big projects around the house), I simply leave one item in my inbox (and I try to make sure there's only one item for each task, no matter how big it is). If I get a phone call and that ends up leading to a new task (say, a magazine assignment), I'll just send myself an email to create a new item for the job. This way, my inbox always functions as a to-do list that I can check in on at a glance, without having to click away to a separate program or screen. Another trick I use: I use Outlook's color-coded flags to note which items I need to do today (red) and tomorrow (blue). (That's my current inbox in the screenshot.) I update these flags every morning to make sure I have my priorities straight. Regardless, the key to this is that you absolutely cannot let your inbox fill up with garbage. That's why you have folders (for stuff you want to keep) and the trash can (for stuff that's over and done with). 
• Deva checks his email for new messages once or twice an hour. I'm guilty of checking whenever I hear the alert of see Outlook pop up a "new email" in the system tray. It's distracting, but I tend to work well that way. I can stop writing in the middle of a sentence, jump away to handle an urgent message, then hop back to what I was doing. Some people can't work this way, and I understand that. For them, it's best to turn off new message alerts so there are minimal distractions.
• For both of us, the goal is to keep the inbox at a reasonable size. For Deva, that means 20 to 25 messages (with a goal of zero). I also have a goal of "as few as possible," with 10 being about average and 5 making me feel really good about being on top of things. My inbox hit zero for a few hours earlier this year, and I didn't quite know what to do with myself.

Got an email management strategy that's better than either of ours? Let's hear about it!