Email inboxes can become as cluttered as their paper counterparts. If yor inbox is more like a 'holding zone', here are some tips to get the old mail out and make the electronic wonder easier to handle. I let my 'pile' of old emails build up, thinking I would use newsletters as research for articles, book topics, etc. Finally, I took the time to red the 'how to' section of my email provider. Duh. What a difference! I can now actually find the emails I want to use, have sorted through and deleted others I thought I'd find useful and have no more than 25 emails in the box at any given time. Anyone else have a story of being an email packrat? Hording is bad - even electronically! :)

I absolutely use folders to sort my email into categories. It's the only way I can survive. Then I can tackle a given category of messages and work my way through it.

Being in my 50's I am working on streamlining the amount of time I spend checking emails = just don't have the PATIENCE any more or time to read everything.

The challenge for me - after separating them into folders to not FORGET to check the folders

So out went that idea and now I am back to keeping everything in my IN box. Now I am under pressure to keep it down to a minimum or risk missing some important deadlines.

It got so stressful a few weeks ago - finally made the painful decision to "cancel" some Google Alerts I had. I just could not keep up. I love to read and had some alerts in place to feed my reading passion.

Oh well, maybe when I am retired and in my rocking chair I can go back to setting up the missing alerts - but not right now.

Awesome question....