How to deal with email overload Ari Meisel People spend a lot of time on email -- way too much for their own good and productivity. Email is a disruptive technology that can take you on a tangent you never intended, and eat up time faster than most other voluntary activities. Email has addictive qualities. Most of us receive email that is unimportant, and yet we continue to check our inboxes incessantly. To free you from email burden, try these simple techniques. Advertisement 1. Optimise To optimise email, you need less of it. Try using a service called Unsubscribe.com to get yourself removed from mailing lists, promotional emails, etc. It uses a Gmail plugin, or you can just forward emails to mail@unsubscribe.com. Try aggregating. Sometimes you receive non-essential emails that are actually beneficial. Aggregating and unsubscribing will cut down on a lot of the incoming mail you receive to begin with. Services such as FriendFeed send a daily summary of social media activity. Dealery will send all the best daily deals, so you don't need to individually subscribe to Groupon , LivingSocial , etc. For good measure, sign up for a Google Alert on yourself, as well as a news aggregator like The Daily Beast . Next comes organisation. I'm a huge fan of OtherInbox , which integrates with Gmail and automatically organises your messages into folders like "Shopping" and "Business". Imagine an inbox with 1000 messages; after initiating OtherInbox, you can watch that inbox shrink to 14 emails --