In recent years, Pam Wiggins dreaded turning on her computer at the office. She loathed what awaited her every day--a whopping 200 e-mails that would take five hours to slog through. "It got to the point where reading and responding to e-mail became my primary focus," says Wiggins, an IT project manager for Verizon Business in Ashburn, Virginia. "I was stressed out all the time, afraid I'd accidentally miss something important because of the sheer volume of e-mails. I did my best to keep up, but it became a losing battle."

Wiggins isn't alone in her e-mail overload. In 2006, the average corporate e-mail user received 126 e-mail messages per day, a 55 percent increase since 2003, according to a survey by The Radicati Group, Inc., a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, California. "If users spend an average of one minute to read and respond to each message, this flood of e-mail traffic will consume more than a quarter of the typical eight-hour workday--with no guarantee that users actually read the messages that are most important," the report said. "Additionally, if e-mail traffic continues to increase at this rate, the average corporate e-mail user will spend 41 percent of the workday managing e-mail messages in 2009."

Inbox overload
Not surprisingly, dealing with e-mail affects the bottom line. A survey from Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, a training company specializing in e-mail efficiency and etiquette in Guilford, Connecticut, showed that e-mail traffic costs businesses an estimated $300 billion in lost productivity and profits annually. As a result, a growing number of companies nationwide--including Pfizer, Capital One, and Novartis--are hiring experts to teach workers how to better manage their inboxes and improve their electronic communications skills.

"Today, people are looking for ways to ignore or delete messages without even reading them," says Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a training and consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio, and author of E-Mail Management: 50 Tips for Keeping Your In-Box Under Control. "Your message must be as compelling as possible to get opened, read, and acted upon."

In surveys of more than 10,000 employees at 70 companies nationwide, Mike Song, CEO of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, has found that e-mail overload causes workers enormous stress and frustration. "Plowing through two-and-a-half hours of e-mail before you sit down to do a new business proposal takes all the fun out of work," says Song, co-author of The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You. "People feel like they're stuck in the mud--or spinning like a hamster on a wheel--because they're spending a quarter to one-third of their day keeping their inbox in a manageable state."

Seize control
In this age of e-mail gone wild, is it possible to escape its ever-widening reach? Sure, you can turn off the sound that signals the arrival of e-mail to prevent distraction, and you can set aside several time blocks each day to address e-mail instead of checking your inbox constantly.

But those practices alone won't cut down on the sheer volume that clogs up your inbox. The solution is to change the way you send, write, and file e-mail. Here are eight high-impact techniques--all recommended by experts and road-tested by employees--to help you manage e-mail more effectively and seize control of your workday.

• Send fewer e-mails. A 20 percent reduction in e-mails sent correlates to a 10 percent reduction in e-mails received, according to Song's research. Before you write a message, ask yourself three questions: Is this information timely and relevant? Does the recipient really need it to do her job today? Is this message appropriate? If the answer to each question is yes, then send the message.
  
  In addition, avoid sending personal e-mail over your work computer--including political rants and jokes. A 2006 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that 68 percent of employers nationwide have a written policy regarding the use of the company's system for personal e-mail and 26 percent have fired employees for e-mail misuse. "If you stop sending personal e-mail at work, you'll have more time to actually do your work--and you'll protect your job," Flynn says.
  
  
• Write strong subject lines. This is your one chance to grab the recipient's attention. If the subject line is vague, indirect, or cutesy, it could easily get overlooked--or misconstrued as spam and ignored. Instead, Song says, it should be complete and descriptive, such as "Information: Notes from October Meeting for ABC Project." The word "information" places the e-mail in a category and telegraphs the response you want--a reading, not a reaction. Write "action" if you want a specific outcome, "request" if you're seeking assistance, "confirmed" if you hope to preempt a back-and-forth discussion, and "delivery" if you're responding to a request.
  
  
• Learn to write tight. Force yourself to write concise messages to increase the chances they'll be read rather than skimmed, says John Tonra, vice president of client services for MTI, a Langhorne, Pennsylvania-based direct marketing company. Use Song's "ABC" method to split the body of the e-mail into three sections: "action" (summarizing your purpose), "background" (presenting key points), and "close" (explaining next steps). Be sure to put your name, title, company, and contact info at the bottom.
  
  
• Use abbreviations and send subject-line e-mail. If you don't need a reply, put the abbreviation NRN (no reply necessary) at the end of the subject line or before the closing. If your message is brief--"Contract arrived"--put it in the subject line with the abbreviation EOM (end of message), so the recipient can read and delete without ever opening the e-mail.
  
  
• Resist the "reply to all" and "cc" features. "Eighty percent of our survey respondents complain that their colleagues overuse 'reply to all' and copy them on unnecessary e-mails," Song says. By sending e-mail only to those who truly need to receive it, you'll get fewer in return.
  
  
• Filter low-priority e-mail. Many software programs, including Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, allow you to designate some senders as "low priority." That way, you can automatically route their e-mail to folders that you check as needed.
  
  
• Create subject folders for archiving. Keeping hundreds of e-mails in your inbox causes stress and frustration when you can't find an important one. Delete insignificant e-mails, then file important correspondence and documents in single subject folders so that you can readily access them. If your employer has a policy for retaining business records, use that to help you decide which e-mails to save.
  
  
• Clean out your crowded inbox. "If you say, 'I won't allow myself to have 50 e-mails in my inbox when I leave work,' you'll become more efficient and more effective in how you handle e-mail throughout the day," says Tonra, who leaves no more than one screen of e-mails (seven) in his inbox at the close of business.

Cynthia Hanson, a Philadelphia-area freelance writer and frequent Jugglezine contributor, has covered workplace issues for 15 years. Her e-mail inbox is clutter-free, but her desk is another story.