Does your email Inbox fill your heart with dread? Does the constant stream of emails keep you in a reactive mode all day preventing or slowing your progress? With the help of a few simple tweaks you can reduce your email stress and regain some lost productivity. 1. Pull email, don’t let it be pushed to you. In your Outlook setting go to Tools > Options> Mail Setup > Send/Receive and turn off the automatic send/receive. With this setting adjusted, schedule time in your day to read email, on your schedule, not reacting to every email that gets sent your way. 2. Set up filters. Most email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora) and webmail systems (Gmail, Yahoo) have the capability to let you set up custom filters. A filter takes email and moves, deletes, or files your email so you either a) don’t have to deal with it, or b) deal with it on your terms. For example, if you know that a certain person sends things that are rarely relevant to you simple set up a filter to send their mail to a folder, bypassing your Golden Inbox. Then, at your convenience you can skim through their emails. You can set up such filters in Outlook by going to Tools > Rules and Alerts. 3. The Three Actions. For every email there are three possibilities: Delete, Make it a Task, Respond. If it is something that you do not want to respond to or requires no action then delete it. If it is something you must act on later drag the email to the Task bar at the bottom left of Outlook and drop it. It will create a Task listing. If the email requires a response right away then write the sender back. This works well if you use tip #1 as you will build your schedule to create time to handle emails. There are a great number of GTD (Getting Things Done) strategies out there that cover everything from managing email, to running your daily planner, to building your shopping list. You can read more at GTD blogs such as 43 Folders.