How deep is your email inbox? Seriously, how deep.

I’ve been there from time to time, but I’ve been proactively working to keep my inbox as close to empty as possible.

If your inbox is over 2000 messages deep, you might need to do something radical.

Perhaps you should declare email bankruptcy. Here is how:

• Step 1: Select all messages in your inbox. (Ctrl+A on a PC or Cmd+A on a Mac)
• Step 2: Delete the selected messages.
• Step 3: Send an apologetic email to your close contacts and ask them to resend anything important.

It is quite refreshing. Don’t worry, people will understand.

On Friday, NPR’s Morning Edition ran the following segment:

Can you go a day at the office without e-mail? Employees at U.S. Cellular try to do that every Friday. A policy implemented a few years ago gives workers a respite from the e-mail avalanche.
Click to read and listen…

Interesting story considering the topic of my recent post about choosing the right messaging medium. I appreciated that the story points out the initial resistance from people, but ultimately, people made additional connections with others.

While you might not be able to force your organization, you can do this yourself, perhaps for a whole day, or even just a couple of hours.

Sometimes you just have to take a step back and point out the obvious.

Today was one of those times. I was in the middle of typing out a detailed email message that was going to be longer than five sentences when a blinding flash of the obvious hit me: pick up the phone.

So I did and it worked. I’m glad that I started typing the email, but very glad that I didn’t click send. Starting to type things out allowed me to collect my thoughts around a difficult conversation. When I picked up the phone, I was clear and concise and convincing. And I think the person that I talked to appreciated that.

Many business professionals carry around an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo or other smartphone. So there is the opportunity to talk, text message or email right from the palm of your hand. But it doesn’t take an email ninja to know when to use the right tool, just one simple rule:

Respect the recipient.

If you have something difficult to share with someone, don’t hide behind an email message. Yes, write a letter or create an outline to organize your thoughts at first. Hiding behind the email message will actually make it more difficult for you in the long run. My rule is that if you are having a hard time picking up the phone, you probably really need to pick up the phone.

If you need an answer right away, email is not the best choice. Yes it is true, email is seriously fast, but it also creates email inbox clutter. Most people leave hundreds or thousands of messages in their email, so if you can simply send a quick instant message with your question, you might just get an immediate answer!

Text messages are great for the one-liners that are time sensitive. Examples such as, “Caught in long meeting and running late,” or “Please stop for pizza on the way home,” or “Do not cut the blue wire.” SMS is relatively instant and if for some reason it doesn’t get through, it keeps trying. For the recipient, they get some form of a beep. If needed, responses are typically very short, such as “No prob,” “OK,” or “Too late.”

What are your best suggestions that “respect the recipient” for phone, email, IM and text messages?

• So the next time that you are about to email the entire world…

And if you receive these emails from family or friends, send them the above link as a kind way to teach them the right way to do it.

Enter DropSend.

With DropSend, you can create a free account that gives you 250 MB of storage and allows you to do 5 sends a month, fine for a quick trial or the infrequent user. Files are sent securely and you can track when files are picked up. There are paid plans that feature more space and more sends. There is even a pro plan that allows for many users and unlimited sends which would work well in a corporate setting.

Of course, this morning, I found this article from Wired Magazine which has some great pointers. And the New York Times has this article which talks about the lack of emotion or tone of voice in emails.

And both Merlin Mann and Guy Kawasaki have posted about 5 Sentence Emails – a philosophy that no message will be more than five sentences long, rather than having large posts. I especially like Merlin’s “Emailarrhea” term.

If you know of other good “Email How To Guides” please post them in the comments.