I don’t know about you, but I receive dozens and dozens of emails daily and that amount of email influx can be intimidating.

I try to manage the email as it comes in, but more often than not, I answer the easy emails and procrastinate answering emails that are actually more important. Sometimes I procrastinate responding so long that the response become irrelevant. Generally on any given day, my email inbox is holding over a hundred emails and that’s after my purging of all the newsletters, notifications, and other junk email.

Email is a necessary evil of modern-day communication, but how do we make it more efficient and more productive without spending hours a day dealing with it?

I’ve tried various zero-inbox techniques without much success. I work really hard to get my emails down to zero and then they slowly creep up to that just-over-a-hundred mark. I then start to stress over my inbox and become even less productive.

So, what to do? Well, I just found this website five.sentenc.es that talks about email more like an SMS message and suggests we limit all email responses to five sentences or less. Novel idea, huh? It even offers a little snippet of text to add to your email signature to explain why your response is limited to five sentences.

So I’ve added the snippet of text to my signatures and I’m going to give it a try and see if my email-response time is reduced and my productivity is increased. I’ll keep you posted.

Five sentences too much? Try also the four.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, or two.sentenc.es versions.

What do you think? How do you handle your email overload?