Most people probably don’t give much thought to how much time they actually waste dealing with email. Here are some tremendous time saving tips to make it manageable.

Email is useful but can also waste your time in different ways.

It takes time to sort it out and decide what to do with it. It easily distracts you from what ever task you were working on prior to reading the email too. You can go from being in a productive mode to distracted very quickly.

My email gets checked as the first and last thing each day. I try to resist the urge of checking it constantly while I work because it gets me sidetracked.

I use email filters heavily to automatically sort out the incoming email as much as possible. This is a tremendous time saver.

As an example, my email program sorts out:

• Spam into my “Deleteable” folder
• Various newsletters into the “Newsletters” folder
• Sales confirmations into “Sales Receipts”
• Affiliate program related email goes into my “Affiliate” folder
• Business related purchase receipts is put into the “Receipts” folder

Altogether I have about 20 folders which help me stay organized.

As good as the built in email filter is, I use a free program called Popfileto help the accuracy even further. Its main strength is its ability to sniff our spam.

This program prescans the incoming email. It uses various techniques to study the characteristics of the email. With a bit of training, the program can quickly filter over 98% of your email correctly.

I use the free email program Pegasus which you can get here.

I have used it for 5+ years and love it. I have every single email of any value that I had sent or had been sent to me. The program sorts it all and allows me to search through it in seconds to locate any email I had received.

One big thing with my email is that I try to deal with it immediately upon reading it.

It either gets answered, deleted or filed away for future reference. I save quite a bit of time by not having to reread emails several times as long as I take care of it the first time.

The key is to keep email as a useful tool while avoiding the distractions it can cause.

Life’s too short to be wasting it when you don’t have to be.

By following simple guidelines, it has helped me to become more productive and profitable at the same time. It just takes a little discipline.