Still, I was floored by the number of respondents who could not stay on top of their email. Eighty percent indicated that they had major issues with email and a full third felt overwhelmed. Not surprisingly, respondents indicated that keeping email organized was a huge problem, second only to spam. I have one piece of advice for everyone who gets more email than they can process in a day: get yourself an email management strategy.

It's easy to complain about your email problem, but it's much harder to do something about it. If you don't get yourself a strategy for dealing with email, you're not being fair to yourself, your customers, or your co-workers. Below, I'll walk you through six ways to squeeze more productivity out of Outlook -- some tips use our product and some don't -- but the bottom line is that you need to analyze your email usage and come up with a strategy that makes email work for you.

Tip #1. Utilize technology to mitigate the impact of spam.
If you don't have spam protection and spam continues to be a problem, utilize technology to eradicate it.

Everyone's got their favorite spam filter. I'm not here to tell you which one to use -- but find one and spend the time to train it to ensure that you are minimizing the inflow of unwanted email. This will go a long way towards reducing your problem. It's easy to identify and delete spam, but the interruption to your workflow and the time it takes to delete unwanted messages will add up, taking time away from the real business at hand.

Tip #2. Use automation to prioritize email.
Analyzing your email in date order is one sure-fire way to ensure that you do not address those issues that are most important to you. Most of us already do some manual form of inbox prioritization. We scan through newly received messages to see if any senders or subjects jump out at us.

I strongly advise that you use automation to do some of this for you. Outlook rules can be built to approximate this scanning process, assigning priority to email from important senders and/or with certain key words and assigning flags or colors and/or sorting into folders for quick viewing. If you have some technical savvy, a little automation here can save you hours of time and, more importantly, help ensure that you address your high priority messages first.