Be warned:

1) eMail can easily and with lightspeed get to a point where everybody is doing nothing productive anymore but just doing eMail.

2) eMail has the ability to suggest people that they actually perfom work (as in value add) when the really do nothing other than just receiving, replying, forwarding and broadcasting messages.

3) eMail (as in spending work time with it) is almost impossible to properly account when you work in matrix style organizations. You can easily spend the whole day fending off your incoming mail and at the end of the day not knowing for what corporate project you spent how much work time and why.

Here some immediate rules for survival.

1. Keep eMail’s to an absolute minimum.
2. Treat eMail like you would treat paper based mail. Ask yourself, “Would I send a paper based mail for that or would i call or IM? If yes, then its probably okay to send that mail (i.e.: because with an eMail you can reach more than one recepient). If not probably a call or IM is better.
3. Don’t use your eMail for IM habits, chat is quick, chat is productive, chat is realtime, but most importantly: You can ignore it! eMail (as paper based mail) usually can’t be ignored and must be processed.
4. Think who you put on TO/CC and whether he/she really needs to read that.
5. Think before you reply, if you might need longer than one or two minutes for the reply, write yourself an action for it and think thoroughly what you want to achieve and whom do you want to address.
6. Don’t reply the same day on an eMail (depends of course on the situation) this is a good measure against ping-pong eMails.
7. Don’t use your eMail-Inbox as your task-list or GTD-Inbox, it overwhelms you.
8. Don’t process your eMail from your eMail-Inbox, copy the whole stack to a seperate folder/file and process it there, when you are finished you can still decide if you want to fetch another stack.
9. Disable eMail auto-notifications (it drives you insane and distracts your focus constantly)
10. Process your eMail stack always to Zero before you fetch another stack.
11. Process your eMail into actions / projects.
12. Pre-Process your incoming eMail following the same procedure every time (i.e.: 1. Eliminate Junk, 2. Move things which are not directly related to your projects/actions but you think are still interesting and of value to a seperate folder and follow up on these i.e.: once a week. Make use of rules for that matter. 3. The remaining eMail’s must be the stuff which is important, forward it to your GTD inbox for further decision on how to handle it.
12. If you use a computer based GTD system, try to forward your incoming eMails (after processing it as in 12.) to your GTD systems inbox.
13. Always process eMails to Zero. (Merlin)
14. Keep a reference to the eMail in your Waiting-For action (i.e.: The subject) so when you launch the reminders you can search for the subject in your eMail archive and respond to the original eMail (Elegant way to keep the thread intact).
15. Don’t archive eMail related to topic, this costs just too much time (over time). Archive just chronologically and make heavy use of the search function (or tagging).

Good luck!
–Rudi

Maybe a ‘chat room’ interface might be more appropriate, rather than the overhead of opening and replying to multiple threads in email?

We use the HP Virtual Room solution which also allows sharing of images and documents, though we mostly just use the chat feature.

Other than that, I only check my work email adress at work, and I regularily do it when I arrive at work, after lunch and before I go.

That does it.