Hotmail, Juno, Comcast and Yahoo email. The list of providers goes on and on. Two questions arise. Firstly how did we ever live without email? Secondly do you control your email or does email control your life? It seems that some people cannot seem to get away from email. Is it a case of anxiety and fear of loss of social contact?

Who knows? One thing is for sure if you don’t control this monster – its juggernaut will control you – and in more ways than one. And this does not entail nor involve the issue of spam email.

No doubt email can cause a lot of disturbances to the unwary as they sit at their computers. Yet their was one most successful email marketer who taught in his seminars that he only opened his email at quickly responded to it but once a week. True he said I have an auto responder system which reassures the sender that I did get their email, and promise to personally take care of it and any issues. I do no question, however there is no law from the creator that I either have to have a TV at the home or cottage or that I have to respond to any emails right at that second. On top of that I have learned that in the vast majority of cases “problems seem to take care of themselves “within short order of time.

There are a number of simple steps and guidelines to manage your email and email systems. Firstly there is no need to have your email set to automatic alert and deliver. You can turn this feature off either in your email and news client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora et al) or in web based email services such as hotmail, yahoo or Google Gmail. Secondly when you do go to read and prune email start at the backside – that is the oldest, not newest messages first. You will find that many of these can be deleted by now en-masse – or with very little time, effort and choice. Thirdly on your once a week flow though – deal with any issues immediately on hand. This is all very similar to the concept of old physical snail mail (dead tree communication). The rule with paper and “snail mail” was to handle each piece of paper only once. In the same way you ( in the vast majority of cases) should only have to open each email once , deal with the issue , then either file away in a specific folder or delete the email into the trash bin. For example if you have a hydro or power bill to pay, pay it on the spot either electronically through the services of online banking or Paypal , or physically write a check from your checking bank account. Why clutter up your mind, memory and systems unnecessarily. Taken care of, it’s noted mentally and crossed off on your mental to do list.

In the end, at the end of the day – the question becomes do you take care of your email and email systems or do they control your life and time. Take care to apply simple precepts, guidelines and systems to your choices of how to handle email and the deluge of email to your life and work. You will be rewarded in spades in terms of time and energy.

Author Bio: Alain I. Levy Search Engine Optimization Engineer Search Engine Optimization Adwords Campaigns Increase Google Yahoo rankings in Keyword searches even for those businesses offline Vancouver BC Pre-Approval Auto Credit Center