Zero email Fridays

I'm sure you know the feeling: You spend five minutes answering one email, only to find that a dozen more have taken its place while you were crafting your response. During business hours, email can be a vicious cycle that never stops, to the point where some are taking drastic steps to get out from under its crushing weight.

The latest idea: Email-free Friday, which a group of engineers at Intel are kicking off in an attempt to stem the tide of electronic noise. The idea isn't just to get people away from Outlook for the day, but to get them interacting more in person or even over the phone, hopefully to encourage better idea generation and more effective problem solving than the coldness of email can offer.

There may also be a secondary benefit of stopping people from sending so much email on the other days of the week: One company says that, after implementing an email-free Friday plan in early 2006, overall messages sent within the company have dropped by a whopping 75 percent. That's incredible.

Sounds like a great start. As a companion, can I humbly suggest a telephone-free Thursday?

Here are some additional personal tips on getting more control over your inbox:

• Don't check your inbox so often. I tweaked Outlook to check for new messages once ever 10 minutes instead of every 2 or 3 to help eliminate distractions from other tasks. Some heavy mail users check once or twice an hour. You aren't going to miss anything, I promise.
• Delete or file messages you're done with. Some people just leave everything in their inbox, from critical tasks to newsletters to spam... and I have no idea how this "system" could possibly function. Create folders for related messages you want to save, and delete the rest. Invest in a spam filter. Most experts say that you should aim for a maxmum of 10 to 20 messages in your inbox at any one time. I personally feel a great sense of accomplishment when I am able to delete or file an email permanently.
• Use a calendar to help you. There's no need to leave a message in your inbox for months to remind you to do something in January. Set an appointment in your calendar and file away the message until you actually need it.
• Use appropriate subject lines. Or change them if someone sends you a "keeper" with a vague heading. Seeing "Project due on Friday 10/19" will be much more helpful than a subject line that reads "Hey..."
• Don't forget the phone, IM, or even a walk down the hall. If it will take you longer to type it than it will to discuss in person, consider getting up out of your seat. The walk will do you good, and they might have candy in their office.