1. Unsubscribe. Be brutally honest with yourself about which information you really have time to read, and get rid of subscriptions to anything you rarely, or never, read.
2. Turn off or filter the bacn. Bacn refers to email like messages from retailers  and social network notifications. It’s not exactly spam, because you’ve signed up to receive it, but not necessarily useful either. While notifications from various services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can sometimes be useful, you should think about whether you actually read them and how much time it can take to delete these emails. Anything you can live without seeing is a candidate for unsubscribing or automatically filtering and dumping into a folder where it can be reviewed periodically. If you use Gmail, you can use its Smart Labels feature to automatically filter out bacn emails.
3. Use RSS. If you can get the information you need via an RSS feed, you should consider moving subscriptions out of your inbox and into your RSS reader.
4. Aggressively archive into folders. Look for anything in your inbox more than two weeks old. If you haven’t responded already, are you ever really going to respond, and is a response even still needed by the sender? Consider dumping these into an archived folder where you can find the information later if you need it and get them out of the inbox.
5. Use filters and rules. For anything I probably don’t need to read immediately, but may need to search for later in a pinch, I have set up automated rules that route those emails directly to folders and have them bypass my inbox. Mailing lists, emails from certain PR agencies and newsletters are often good candidates for automated filtering.
6. Color-code. Using colors gives you a quick way to scan your inbox and read the important mail before you tackle everything else and makes it much more likely you won’t miss critical email. For example, I currently have emails from my boss, my employees and several other key people in orange; emails from two important community mailing lists in blue and spam reports for blogs / forums in red. All of those catch my eye and allow me to respond quickly to several crucial types of email before I get through everything else.
7. Consider inbox zero. Inbox zero is more of an ideal than a reality for me most of the time, but it’s something I strive to achieve, since I can be so much more productive when I’m not losing track of critical emails languishing unnoticed in my inbox. Even if you can’t maintain inbox zero, getting there even occasionally can be a big productivity booster.
8. Get tasks onto a to-do list. Even if you don’t aspire to inbox zero, getting tasks out of your inbox and into a to-do list can help you get organized and better manage email. Once you move an item to your to-do list, you can archive the email off into a folder where you can read it again later if you need to.
9. Batch process. I try to process my email a few times a day rather than getting caught up in it constantly. My color coding means that I can still glance at my inbox to catch critical items, while letting everything else languish for a couple of hours until I have time to process it all in one big batch.
10. Turn off new email notifications. If you’re getting pop-ups or other invasive notifications of new email, turn those off now! They can be a constant distraction that only increases your feeling of overload, and it detracts from the idea of batch processing email. It can be very hard to be productive and get real work done with constant notifications of new email, especially since the vast majority of email isn’t so time sensitive it can’t wait for a couple of hours until you have time to deal with it.
11. Send less. The more email you send, the more you will receive in return; sending email encourages other people to reply. Before you email someone, think about whether you could use another method. Sometimes a quick IM conversation or phone call can quickly resolve an issue and reduce the amount of email going back and forth discussing an issue.

Still feeling overloaded? Check out my post from last week, where I outlined various hacks to reduce information overload using a combination of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, web APIs and services like PostRank.

Image courtesy Flickr user Jeff Turner.

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• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email
• What Facebook Messages Is Really After

This survey was conducted online in December 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed U.S. adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

We’ve written extensively on how to get more organized, how to tame your inbox, and how to improve collaboration, but the folks at Intermedia add these suggestions:

• Work off your business priorities, not your email inbox. Highly productive workers use email as a communication tool for business results, rather than responding to emails as they come in. Focus on what needs to get done for your job and prioritize email review and response with that in mind.
• Collaborate online rather than simply sending messages back and forth. Email is great for communication, but not always the best tool for collaboration. Tools for document management solve this problem and are available online.
• Unify communications to get back one hour of your life per day. Rather than use separate tools and devices to check email, make phone calls, and instant message colleagues, businesses increasingly use “unified communications” to combine them in one tool. Sage Research estimates this system can increase productivity by over 12.5 percent, or one hour per day for each worker.

The survey also found that workers resolve to respond more quickly to business communications. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

How do you plan to get more organized in 2011?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Social Inbox Vs. the Future of Email
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Getting Your Inbox In Order

Etacts offers a dashboard that points out what emails you’ve recently received but haven’t replied to, singling out any emails that seem more important based on the frequency of your conversations with a particular email address. It even bumped an email from my mom up to the “important” category. You can also set reminders, either through the dashboard or through a bookmarklet set up for Gmail.

You’ll also find that the tool pulls in older emails and uses them to rank your contacts for you. Based on those ranks, you can see how recently you met someone, who you’ve lost touch with recently and even any reminders you’ve set on their email addresses. Etacts offers the option of manually adding phone calls, too, and can factor that information into its rankings.

Sending Your Emails

If you’re interested in streamlining your email even further, Etacts offers tools for sending emails without switching back to Gmail. You can create message templates, send multiple emails at once — not the same emails to different people, but multiple emails in one screen — and track who has responded to your emails.

If you’ve gone to some effort to create groups within your Gmail contacts, don’t worry. Those will be imported into Etacts as well. You can also create new groups within the web application. Once you’ve got groups in place, you can set reminders on when to contact those groups.

From Gmail to Etacts

In order for Etacts to have the information about your email it needs, you’ll need to give it permission to access your Gmail account. That access is protected, of course: while you can choose to log in using your Gmail address and your password, the default is that you can grant authorized access to your Google account via oAuth. That fact makes life a lot easier if you decide that you want to limit the site’s access to your account down the road — you don’t have to change your password. Unfortunately, that access seems to be one of the key reasons why Etacts hasn’t expanded to other email providers. Gmail is simply easier for the web application to work with. Etacts only downloads email headers to figure out who your most important contacts are — it doesn’t download entire messages.

Etacts is free. Note: When you first grant Etacts access to your email account, be prepared to let the web application do its thing for a while. Especially if you’re a heavy email user, it can take a while to import your emails and analyze them.

Let us know what you think of Etacts in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

AwayFind launched over a year ago, but has continued to grow. The service rolled out new features for existing users just in time for the holidays. If you’re an existing user, you can access the  features by migrating your account to the new version, known as Orchant.

New in this version of AwayFind is the ability to determine the criteria for an urgent message. Depending on whether an email falls into the specific categories you choose, you can have a message sent to you by text message, IM or Twitter DM. You can even automatically direct messages to someone else if need be — if, for instance, a client needs help, you can have the message forwarded to technical support without needing to even see the email at all. And if you’re not near your computer, you can even arrange for AwayFind Orchant to call you with a particularly urgent message and read it off to you.

Jared Goralnick, the founder of Awayfind, says that the most important new feature is the tool’s ability to notify you. “If you’re waiting to hear from an important client or are worried your afternoon appointment may cancel, AwayFind can notify right away when they email you. You can receive this notification (including much of the message’s contents) via SMS, IM, Twitter DM, or even via a phone call that will read you the message. As an AwayFind user, you have total control over what messages trigger which notifications…so you can close your inbox and focus on your work or travel in peace.”

You can have AwayFind Orchant notify you whenever you receive an email from a specific person. The same technique also works if an email contains specific keywords, is marked high priority or is sent to a certain number of recipients. If you can narrow down the characteristics of an urgent email, you can have it delivered to your phone, Twitter account or wherever else you are without taking any additional steps.

Another crucial change is the ability to control who receives your auto responder and your AwayFind contact information. If, for instance, there’s a co-worker who already knows your email checking schedule, you can have AwayFind avoid sending him a link to your contact page, which you know he doesn’t need. You can also limit how often your AwayFind message goes out. You can set it to send on a set schedule, so that individuals who send you messages on a regular basis won’t get a link to your AwayFind page every time they send you a message.

If you’re using Gmail, AwayFind Orchant can configure tools like an email signature and an intelligent auto responder, without you having to set up each step. Each part of AwayFind Orchant is put together in such a way as to simplify the process of reading and responding to email, ensuring that you will always receive important messages without facing the distraction of unimportant emails. There are new features in the pipeline, too. Goralnick says, “Next for us is better integration with the most popular ways our users access email — Gmail and Outlook. We want people to be able to manage AwayFind from wherever they already manage email. We also hope to offer native Microsoft Exchange support.”

Have you tried the new AwayFind Orchant? Has it helped you streamline your email process?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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Besides the new features, Threadsy has resolved many bugs and vastly improved its load time. Considering everything that it’s trying to do at once, it’s understandable why its launch sequence seemed sluggish, especially compared with regular one-mailbox email services. In my testing, I set up several different types of email and social-networking accounts. In a matter of seconds, I was looking at Twitter and Facebook messages and emails from my Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts, and could quickly jump from the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink view of all my messages to each service’s view.

I like how Threadsy pays attention to the little details with its UI. For example, if you don’t look closely then you’ll miss another useful new feature which can be a big time-saver. When you open an email message, the action icons are now always conveniently visible at the top.

Many users still don’t know about Threadsy’s support for Meebo’s Meebo Bar, which was announced in November. This opens up your Threadsy to IM, because you can now add all of your accounts from GTalk, AIM, Yahoo Chat, MSN Chat, Facebook Chat, MySpace IM and many more.

MySpace M.I.A?

Speaking of MySpace, I do have one minor complaint. I don’t understand why Threadsy doesn’t support MySpace. True, its popularity has dropped in recent times, replaced by Facebook and Twitter, but believe it or not there are still tons of folks using MySpace. As a matter of fact, I have many friends that only use MySpace so there’s no way to communicate with them from inside Threadsy, which defeats its purpose of being a unified social inbox. Threadsy reps told me that they have just received the development documentation for the new MySpace API that was released last week. Although no time frame was given, this clearly means there are plans to support MySpace in the near future, which is great news.

Threadsy is still in private beta, but if you’d like to give it a test drive yourself there are invites available to the first 500 people to click this link.

Tried Threadsy? Let us know what you think. Is it still information overload or is this the future of online communication?

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
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Several upcoming products (Google Wave, for example) want to make every communication channel available in one place in real time and should, in theory, help to make all these communications easier to manage. But will these apps actually make it harder to separate business and personal lives? Will real-time access to all electronic messages make it more difficult for us to provide effective customer service while maintaining personal lives? As Mashable asks: are we ready for the walls between email, messaging and related technologies to come a-tumbling down?

These products appear to be the next-generation “universal inbox,” although as Sam points out, such services have been tried before, with limited success. I wrote about a couple of message aggregators a few weeks ago, although the services I profiled aren’t real-time. At first glance, these next-generation universal inboxes appear to be good ideas — messages of any sort, using whatever channel, will go to one place, and important people can have priority visibility.

Some companies with significant clout are pushing the next-generation universal inbox. Google Wave has been extensively covered, and will be more widely available in September. Google Wave is expected to have additional capabilities, but its real-time communication features are key. Real-time communication is also included in Shareflow, which Darrell reviewed recently.

In addition, the cellphone maker HTC (previously known as manufacturer of such phones as the Android G1) is planning a major consumer push, with its own Android-based “people-centric” software and interfaces. In its software, you will prioritize your contacts, and the interface will display all communications from that person (whether email, SMS, IM or Facebook) in one place.

All of these products (none of which I have yet used) seem to assume that we will go to the trouble of assigning each of our contacts to one or more groups, which can then be given an appropriate level of access. This is an old idea that’s been a feature of every operating system that I know of.

But frankly, users like me, with over a thousand contacts in my address book, won’t want to individually assign people to groups. It’s much easier to give clients one email address, and friends and family another. The same is true of IM accounts and phone numbers. Similarly, some people don’t “friend” business connections on their Facebook accounts, preferring to use a site like LinkedIn instead.

I worry that the next-generation universal inbox services will require a lot of setup and maintenance, and ultimately, make it harder to carve out personal time. People are already feeling the need to check email, text and tweet at concerts and baseball games. Maybe it’s time to bring back pagers.

How will you prioritize electronic communication in the approaching era?

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• A 2011 NewNet Forecast
• A 2011 Mobile Forecast
• Big Data 2011 Preview