Getting out of email jail? My first step would be:

Empower employees and community members to be able to respond more quickly and solve more problems without resorting to emailing an anonymous inbox somewhere and waiting weeks for a response.

In my daily routine I use email, instant messaging, twitter, telephone and face-to-face conversations depending on what is most appropriate, and it works incredibly well.

And a change will come, as I’ve recently seen research showing the use of social networks etc is actually eating into the use of email by teenagers.

An email tax is unworkable, and takes away from the reason people have embraced email/social communication etc. It’s quick, easy and free at a time when the rising cost of living makes everything prohibitively expensive. The only problem is reminding people that although email is quick, easy and free, it’s not a suitable solution for everything.

I follow the Getting Things Done principles and Merlin Man’s ‘Inbox Zero’. Works wonderfully for me. For a more radical approach also follow Luis Suarez’s venture to stop using email. You can read more on his blog. I blogged about it too.

I used to get hundreds, now probably ten a day. I simply stopped sending so much email. I asked people not to CC me and directed all such mail to deleted items automatically, with a notice to the sender.

I find the size of your inbox is proportional to that of your sent items.

Email clients need to get smarter too. Where’s the microformats for GTD items, for example? After all the innovation at the launch of gmail how come it hasn’t evolved into a contact management system that allows me to tag people I email, records stats and reminds me to contact them an appropriate number of times?

Email is a write-once medium. Once hit send does the content I’m no longer able to edit. Write-once doesn’t accommodate a world of continuous changes. Email simply defies wikinomics.

- Martin Cleaver, Blended Perspectives.

[...] that the real problem with knowledge work is e-mail (e.g. see our own blog here and here). I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced [...]