If your email isn’t organized into client folders or marked with labels you’re pretty much beat and can kiss your summer goodbye. Personally I think gmail is the best for this. Any message from any client is at my fingertips.

Gmail’s Priority Inbox add-on is mind blowing because over time it analyzes your email habits, such as what you open, who you reply to, how much time you spend on the message, and so on. You can mark messages as priority–it learns from you. After a while important messages float to the top of the list and are labeled for action and lower priority messages move to the bottom of the unread stack.

2. Don’t check your email first thing

Here’s why…. When you get into your office, try and think of one thing you can do before digging into your inbox. Sometimes I’ll straighten up for a few minutes, take some old coffee cups down to the kitchen, look at some papers on my desk for a project and think for a bit, or write a blog post for my PR director.

Once you check the messages, your brain clicks into a very different, and much less creative mode.

3. Unsubscribe from pointless email marketing
Email marketing messages (not talking about spam) that show up in your inbox create visual clutter and have the potential to bog you down. Unsubscribe from the pointless ones. It only takes a sec and over a week or so, your volume of the messages will decrease. The other option is to have them sent to another email address so you can peruse the deals when you’ve got some free time. The separate address is good, too, for online shopping so you can keep all the invoices and shipping receipts separate.