This document discusses tools that can help manage email overload. It describes how information overload costs the US economy $1 trillion annually and how processing just 100 emails can take half a day. It then recommends three tools to help manage emails - Rapportive to add contact details to emails, WriteThat.Name to automatically update and augment contact information from email signatures, and focusing on unsubscribing from unnecessary subscriptions and better organizing emails.

1. Tools to Help Conquer Your Email
We can all admit we’re suffering from information overload, right? We’re constantly
interrupted by emails, texts, Tweets, a new
Facebook status update, etc. Jonathan Spira
wrote a book to address this problem called
“Overload! How Too Much Information Is
Hazardous to Your Organization”. Some of
the staggering statistics from Spira’s book
include:
Information Overload cost the U.S.
economy almost $1 trillion in 2010
Reading and processing just 100 e-
mail messages can occupy over half
of a worker’s day.
It takes five minutes to get back on track after a 30 second interruption.
For every 100 people who are unnecessarily copied on an e-mail, eight hours are
lost.
As the CEO of a software company, I know I accumulate way too much email each day to
possibly get through it all. I’m dependent on Google Priority Inbox to keep me organized
and highlight my most important email. But is there a more effective way to manage
email? After doing some research, I’ve found a few resources that manage email in three
key ways: managing contacts, unsubscribing from useless subscriptions, and organizing
your email as a whole. Let’s have a look.
Managing Your Contacts
I get so many emails everyday and it’s hard to keep track of who’s who when you only have
an email address and name. Rapportive brings a visual element to your email contacts by
adding a sidebar to the Gmail window allowing you to see information about the person
with whom you are communicating. The information provided allows you to connect with
them on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can add notes to remind yourself of the
relationship you have with that person. With Rapportive, no contacts get lost in your email,
and you can keep up with them via social media. And an added bonus – the sidebar hides
Google ads.
But what about your Gmail address book? The contacts in my Gmail can get really messy
and it’s too much of a hassle to add specific information about each
contact. WriteThat.Name acts like a personal assistant that constantly updates my address
book in Gmail. WriteThat.Name augments information by analyzing the signature line of
each person’s email. WriteThat.Name also lets you know via email which contacts have
been updated that day.
Read more: http://technorati.com/technology/article/tools-to-help-conquer-your-
email/#ixzz1sqFo4CbE