A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy wrote that he can’t keep up with his bloated inbox anymore and there were some good ideas in that post’s comments. The ever-increasing Inbox seems to be a problem for more and more people. Some people try to be part of the solution and not the problem. I, for one, like writing “complete” e-mails, so restricting myself into 5 sentences might not be for me – except at work, where I think many of us have this problem and keeping e-mail short and clear is always a good policy.

What I’m afraid of in restricting your e-mails to certain length is that it makes e-mail into IM or SMS (something the guys at sentenc.es see as a good thing).  In these mediums (or media, to be correct) the character-limit, in my opinion, forces you to leave a lot of context out of your message, rendering the message to more akin to a stream of consciousness. I like to think that e-mail as more a self-contained thing.

Anyway, the net’s premier productivity guy, Merlin Mann, recently gave a speech about “Inbox Zero” at Google. If you have an hour to spend in sake of productivity, take a look at his presentation.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925]

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