Until I started spending more time on social networking and on doing product reviews, I got maybe one or two emails a day. Now, I get hundreds, and there are days when I open up Outlook and just about fall off the couch looking at all the emails there are for me to go through. And that’s just one email account! I also have three Gmail accounts. I’ve had to devise a strategy to help me manage not only the emails themselves but the information they contain. Here is what is working for me right now:

1. Performing some kind of action on each email as I open it. I used to just skim through, opening and reading, and then I would have 800 opened emails in my inbox. Not only is that inefficient, but it makes it more likely that I will forget something important in one of the emails.

Now, I open each one and deal with it immediately, either by deleting it if it’s not information I need to keep (more on that in a minute), performing an immediate action such as returning a friend request or replying to a blog comment, or by moving the email.

2. Moving email to somewhere other than the inbox. I’ve created a system of my own and you’ll have to choose one that works for you, mine is to move emails to either a pending folder, the Outlook Calendar, or into a blog post.

a. Emails that I receive that are to request advertising or a product review go into a folder labeled with the name of the advertiser or product. Each subsequent email I get as we correspond goes into that same folder. That makes it easier to manage what information we have shared, the details of the transaction, as well as the names and contact information for each person involved.

b. Emails reminding me of an upcoming deadline get copied and pasted directly into Outlook Calendar. It’s proven to be one of my most valuable organizational tools. I can see at a glance what I have coming up, and I can use the TaskPad to remind me of reviews that don’t have a specific date to be completed. After I finish an assignment, I delete it from the calendar.

c. This final organizational tip took me WAY too long to think up, and that’s using the Drafts feature of Wordpress to store email information. Once all the details of a review have been worked out, I create a new blog post containing all the information I will need for the review, including the name and email address of the person to whom I will be sending the link once the review is completed. Why do that? Because that way I don’t have to go back and forth between the blog post and my Inbox to find all the pertinent information.

3. Finally, the best advice I have for managing email is to UNSUBSCRIBE from anything you don’t absolutely need. I will sometimes come across a website that just seems so interesting that I sign up for it’s newsletter, and then after a few of those, I realize that it’s just one more email to open. I don’t mean blog feed subscriptions, I mean like the Web M.D. daily health report newsletter, stuff like that. If you aren’t really using the information, scroll down to the bottom and click the unsubscribe link.

Everyone handles email differently, so if you have a tip for me that I haven’t thought of, please leave it in your comment! I’ve resigned myself to the fact that email isn’t going away any time soon, so it has to be managed and incorporated into daily life.

For about a week earlier this year, I worked for an online company. And one of the things they gave me was a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007. It was a huge upgrade from the 2003 version I had been using.

I love Outlook. I love being able to see all my messages in one column, and having them open up in a new column, without having to go back and forth. And I love the Calendar. I use it to schedule all of my DVD and product reviews, and my favorite part is the drag-and-drop feature. If I don’t have time to get something done one day, I can just drag and drop the task into the next day. It’s very cool.

I was going to tell you how to get your own copy of Outlook 2007, but it turns out it’s only available if you buy the whole 2007 Microsoft Office Suite. I don’t even know how the online company was able to give me just Outlook and not PowerPoint, Word, and Excel too. Hmm. The whole Suite costs around $330.00.