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.

And once your email inbox gets too deep to manage, what do you do? You probably scroll up and down to find a message from someone or from three days ago. Maybe you organize your messages into a nested collection of folders for co-workers, clients, projects, friends, humor, etc. If you are lucky, your email has a great search tool or “smart” filtering capability, but most people barely know how to use this at all.

It all just seems like too much work.

What would you do differently if your email program only stored messages for 24 hours?

Or is the question really this: once you have read an email message the first time, what is it still doing in your inbox?

1. Make sure that your email messages are very generic.
2. Send them out too frequently.
3. Add people to your list that haven’t asked.
4. Include everyone in the “To:” or “CC:” fields.
5. Write really long email messages.

Since I’m “in the biz,” I frequently stay subscribed just to see what businesses are doing, so I am much more tolerant.

Here are a few basic tips to keep your email marketing campaigns actually working for you.

1. Ask for permission before adding people to your email list.
2. Customize the messages to each person, if even just a little bit.
3. Adjust the frequency of your messages so that you don’t bug people.
4. When writing the message, give shorter snippets of the story and link to your blog or your website for further reading. Do not include the entire story in the email message.

And on another topic entirely, make sure that your “news” is in an RSS feed.

But what is Bacn? (It’s pronounced bacon, but in Web 2.0 lingo.)

Bacn is email that you asked for and perhaps want to read at some point, but it isn’t remotely urgent. Bacn tastes like this:

• An email from your favorite online store announcing a sale.
• An email from Plaxo reminding you of someone’s birthday or address change.
• An email from your credit card company reminding you that you have a payment due next week.
• An email from a social networking site (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) letting you know that you have a new friend, contact or message.
• An email from a sales trainer with this week’s amazing sales tip.
• An email from a magazine with a rundown of the latest stories.

The amazing thing about Bacn is that if you ignore it, more will show up later. When you have time to read it, you appreciate the message, perhaps even enjoy reading the messages. When you don’t have time, Bacn clutters your overstuffed email inbox.

My rule about Bacn:
If you don’t have time to read it right now, delete it right now.

You will never have enough time to catch up on all of those useful stories, tips and such. And if you find that you consistently delete a particular flavor of Bacn, unsubscribe from it. Most Bacn messages have an unsubscribe link at the bottom which takes less then 10 seconds to click and confirm.

Think about this…You have Outlook open in the background and you start to do some productive work and only 5 minutes later, the new message sound goes off or alert pops up on your screen. Instant interruption. And then your brain starts to debate whether or not to check to see what the message is about. After all, it might be extremely important. So, you flip over to your email program only to find that the message didn’t require your immediate attention, or more likely, was some junk message that you immediately deleted.

The problem is now you are looking at your email inbox only to see hundreds or thousands of messages that you haven’t dealt with. Your productive time is shot because while your computer can have many programs open, your brain can only focus on one thing at a time and right now it is your email inbox. So even if you go back to what you were originally doing, you have only a few more minutes before the next email interruption.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to be writing about how I’ve gotten control over my email inbox in a way that most people find completely inconceivable.

My first tip is this: Close your email program. Not permanently, but for at least two to three hours each day, don’t even have it open. No alerts, sounds, or other email distractions; you have work to do and surely it doesn’t require Outlook to be open.

From Web Worker Daily’s article “7 Rules for Communicating Clearly and Concisely in Email…”

“The truth is that people don’t have time for long emails, and they don’t have time to try to find out exactly what you want. You have to tell them, in as short an email as possible.”

Lots of good tips for those of you that use email every day.

• How the CAN-SPAM Act affects online marketing

No ads, no sales, no special offers, no testimonials, just a short message from another good human. So after having a fabulous customer experience with a recent order from Lens.com, they have absolutely solidified themselves in my mind as a company that I can commit to in the future.

Thank you, Jennifer Cole.

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.