Google “Email Overload,” and you’ll come across an endless stream of both lamentations and suggestions from people who have come to view the inbox as a sort of albatross choking the productivity from their lives.

Many may feel this way, but there are ways to tame the beast.

Ideally, this happens before email ever reaches the inbox. That’s part of what Sendmail does—reducing spam and other clutter through intelligent email policy management.

But there’s only so much that can be enabled on the backend (which I’ll spend more time on in a future post). A lot also depends on you. And while the internet already offers suggestions aplenty, as someone who’s spent the last 15 years or so working for companies that specialize in the management of email and other electronic communications—and as someone who like you has struggled to get a handle on the inbox—I thought there still might be enough room to squeeze in my two cents.

And here they are:

1. Use your folders

• Someone once told me the trick to managing the inbox is to stop thinking of it as a to-do list. Emails should support the completion of tasks, not create new ones. Of course, there’s always the one-off requests you’re going to get, but email for the most part can be categorized by activity. If you create a folder for each activity, you can quickly eyeball each note, route it appropriately, and then address it only when you’re ready to start working on that particular task

2. Wait

• Email isn’t real-time. So why try to respond in real time? Instead of firing off a reply everytime a new email comes in, let it breathe awhile. This will prevent that endless back-and-forth trap that chews into your productivity by showing senders that email isn’t just another form of instant messaging for you. Once your colleagues realize their emails won’t always be met with a fast reply, you’ll feel more comfortable ignoring emails as they come in until you’ve completed the task at hand.

3. Use other communication methods

• Email isn’t instant messaging or social media or the phone, and as long as you’re reachable via these technologies, it doesn’t happen to be. As long as people know there are other ways of reaching you for more urgent matters, you’re still available to put out fires when needed. The best part? People tend to cut to the chase more when they’re IMing or phoning, which means even less time is taken from your day.

4. Keep your work separate from the personal stuff

• With more people emailing from their mobile devices, it’s become common for people to send work matters from personal accounts and vice versa. The result is unnecessary distractions during the work day and no real punching out for personal time. Cut down on this by being more careful about who you share your email accounts with and which accounts you’re using to send emails from in the first place

5. Practice safe sending

• Just as you should insulate yourself from unnecessary email, you must also be responsible about the emails you generate. I read somewhere that reading the average email takes about 15-20 seconds. This doesn’t include the time spent constructing an email, searching for the right attachment, sending the email, and reading and constructing replies. Before you click send, ask yourself: Do I have time for this? If not—if the objective of your email can be resolved much more quickly on the phone or face-to-face—then you need to click cancel.

There are also a number of new apps and tools out there that help people better manage their box—Sanebox is one interesting example, though I have not yet tried any of these tools – have you? Of course, there are other ways to cut down on the clutter. How do you do it? Please share!