Le email!

French enterprise IT firm Atos has banned employees from sending emails to each other, ABC News reports, in an amazing blow in the battle against email. CEO Thierry Breton, who was the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, apparently loathes the stuff, claiming just 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive a day are useful and 18 percent are spam. Mr. Breton told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in three years.

Atos employees now have 18 months to wean themselves off email, using instant messaging and a "Facebook-style interface," instead. Employees have reportedly already succeeded in cutting email bloat by 20 percent in six months.

How much do we love this company? And how much do we love their Twitter? This much, we tell you. Side note: Computer Weekly just awarded the Atos CIO Agenda blog, which features topics such as "How to win when you don’t know the rules," the "2011 CIO blogger of the year" designation. Congratulations on your lifestyle change, Atos.

Mr. Holmes.

Chris Holmes is the founder and CEO of Meshin, on a mission to bring the world a contextually unified, prioritized view of the people and information that matter most, so they can better understand what takes priority and bring them to action.

Mr. Cieplak.

This is a guest post from Gordon Cieplak, Creative Director at 8tracks and the principal of Handsome Code. You can find him @gordoncc on Twitter and grdn.cc on Tumblr, his preferred methods of distraction.

Gordon Cieplak, web designer

Email is awesome. It is the foundation for all electronic communication. (You know, after things like math, transistors, TCP/IP, etc.) Basically, every 'tech start-up' in New York is an elaborate way to send an email that says 'Hey, look at me!' or 'Hey, look at this stuff I like!'

That said, like anything awesome that man has invented (and I mean man, not woman, you raucous 'change the ratio' maniacs), it ends up becoming more of a chore than the incredible and liberating tool that it is.  But we (both men and women) only have ourselves to blame, the technology is not the culprit.

So, if you get lots of email and it's a pain in the ass to deal with it and you feel like a 'hero' when you can manage, you are not an 'inbox hero.'  You're just a technologically confused asshole, like most of us. This column really should be called 'inbox assholes,' though that sounds like the name of a niche porn site.  But I digress.

If you get lots of email that must be answered, that is an awesome problem, because that means you have responsibility.  That means somebody values your words and judgment, and that you probably get paid for those pieces of information. Being an information worker is great, because it's pretty easy, pays well, and mostly doesn't result in life-threatening illness, though I did have quite an existential malaise at my first full-time job, which was easily remedied by a quick trip to South America where just my longing for American-style pizza was enough to make me come crawling back to hyper-consumption and information overload.

Anyway, the point is that the most challenging part of being an information worker (And I mean information, not knowledge.  Knowledge is useful information, and most information work is not useful) is actually getting things done and avoiding distractions, which is hard if you have access to the internet.  With the current fucked-up system of online advertising, most of the internet is literally designed to consume as many possible seconds of your time and get you to click on irrelevant shit. And really, with all those calls to action for 'cool singles in your area,' and 'top 100 most valuable startups’ how can you really get anything done?

But on top of that, our workspaces are invaded by bullshit.  We get email all the time from social networks, digests from 'culture blogs,' and requests from Observer writers asking you to spy on startups or write guest columns for them.  How can you actually get your allotted 15 minutes of work per day done with all that?

As it so happens, I just read a book that's supposedly about working less and getting rich, but really it's about how to not use your computer like an idiot. It's called The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferris, and while you feel like a marketing/sales douche just by reading it, it has some great advice.  Mainly, close your goddamn email window for a second.

The second you don't get little notifications that you have a new message, a new IM, a new like on your sandwich photo blog, your computer suddenly becomes incredibly powerful, and you have much more time to finish all the crap you were supposed to do.

Mr. Ferris recommends initially that you check your email twice a day--start with 12 p.m. and 4 p.m., and deal with everything in a focused session of 10 to 15 minutes at those times. If you must, compose an auto-response telling people that you'll get back to them at X time and to give you a call if it's urgent. I didn't bother with that because I've always had my number in my email footer, and nothing I do is really that important or urgent. (Also, auto-responses are really, really annoying.) I did get a few more calls, but on the whole nobody noticed and while I'm not sure I'm getting more done, I am spending less time on the computer in general.

Supposedly, Mr. Ferris checks his email once a week, presumably in the form of curated summaries from his dozen virtual assistants, while training for his next extreme sports challenge or demonstrating his technique for 15 minute orgasms (see the 4-Hour Body for that one) for for an entrepreneurial bikini model conference in Thailand. Clearly, we can't all roll like Tim Ferris, but I think his basic idea of closing your Gmail window most of the time is fucking great.

To summarize:

- Don't use whatever 'priority inbox' is.  Passing off more responsibility to machines is the last thing to do.

- Don't use the Gmail/whatever web UI.  Those tend to have IM, which is an even deeper distraction.

- I recommend Sparrow if you're on a Mac. Or Mail if you don't want to spend $10.

- Put your number in your footer.

- Check your email twice a day, then close it.  Or hell, check it three times, or six times daily.  As long as you do it at some sort of regular interval and mostly don't have it open to distract you.

- Get your shit done with your newfound free time.

According to Mr. Ferris, these are all just stepping stones to working remotely (which is something I happen to do and I have to say is pretty awesome) and then ultimately creating some sort of profitable company that pays you thousands per week while you get massages in Southeast Asia and go kiteboarding. I have yet to figure that part out, but the first bit about email has already made my days much more pleasant. I hope it will for you too.

For Inbox Heroes, Betabeat is curious about your war stories, productivity tips and moments of extraordinary email. Send us an email to tips et betabeat daught com with “war on email” in the subject line and a paragraph or two (or more!) about how you deal with your influx of electronic letters.

Adrianne Jeffries, Betabeat blogger

The key is Gmail and its extra functionality and extensions. Gmail tells me I am using 5,014 MB of my 7,628 MB. I would estimate I get between 50 and 100 emails a day and most of them are things I actually want to read. I know a lot of people get more than that--this series was inspired by a conversation with ZocDoc COO Oliver Kharraz, who gets between 1,000 and 2,000 emails a day--but they pile up.

Lately my system is to try to do something with every email as it comes in. Just to get it out of the inbox. So I will label it, or respond to it, or trash it or archive it. Emails inevitably pile up anyway, and I try to blaze through those on the weekend in a sort of slash and burn dance of vengeance. I call it "email slaying."

I have three email addresses connected to my Gmail: my personal email, my Observer email, and my official email, which is the address on my website (I think I might have a Betabeat email too, but no one uses that). Thanks to labels, I can tell right away which inbox is getting what. Actually the official website email address is the most exciting because it gets the least amount of volume and it's super random. Letter from a not-so-internet-savvy reader! Note from a borderline stalker! Tips from Bitcoiners! Old friends! Of course, it gets plenty of missives from the email press release factory as well.

I have more than 20 labels including: "startup news roundup," "rumors," "interesting," "apps to try," "email press release factory," "tasks to do" and "POST THIS." I have a "working" label for longer pieces I'm working on, and each of those has a nested label beneath "working," i.e. "working/Ceglia," "working/Fitocracy," "working/Bitcoin." Then when the story is over I delete the label. Awesome. Filters drop some emails directly into their respective labels and the label turns bold when it has an unread email.

Recently, I found a setting in Gmail Labs that adds a button for "send and archive" so that when you reply to an email, it archives the whole conversation instead of keeping it in the inbox. This simple trick has reduced the number of already-dealt with emails just sitting in my inbox, staring at me and stressing me out.

I also use the Gmail plugin Boomerang, which lets you schedule emails to send later or takes an email out of your inbox and returns it to your inbox a few hours later, or a day later, or whatever, or at a specific time. The problem with responding to email is that it tends to generate more email. So sometimes when I'm email slaying, I'll schedule all my responses to send the next morning. That ensures I won't get bogged down with replies-to-replies while I'm trying to get to inbox zero.

I'm sure there are more Gmail tricks that would help me, but I have been too lazy to look into it in depth. (Also, Gmail is starting to get bogged down by all the add-ons I'm already using.) I'd love to use Priority Inbox, but I just don't trust it. I mean, sometimes, Gmail sends real things to spam. Is there anything more terrifying than missing a juicy news tip because it went to spam?

I had two ideas for controlling my email. One idea was to put on an auto-response that would say, "Hi there! I get a lot of email. Please understand that it may take several days for me to respond. While you wait, you can amuse yourself by reading my latest story: < link to one of my recent posts >." In theory this would result in more people reading my stories and fewer people sending me emails to ask if I got their emails. Or calling me to ask if I got their emails. Maybe I would add a note: "PS -- If you are a PR person I have never spoken to before, please do not call me about your email. You must have faith in the strength of your subject line and the mettle of your pitch."

The other idea was tiered inbox pricing. Sometimes I feel like I'm looking at a list of demands when I read my inbox. At a minimum, each email is asking for my attention. Most are asking for a response and some of them are asking for action. With email, it's very easy to send one-way demands. So I started imagining a system where I could charge $5 to read and respond to your email within 12 hours. For $2, I will read and respond in 48 hours. And so on. However, I felt this was ultimately kind of crappy and borderline unethical.

Send us your stories from the frontlines of the battle against email to tips (at] betabeat.com.