“Revive your Inbox” is a free 21-day program put out by the folks at Baydin, who have invented a few useful tools to help manage email. While they do recommend their products, which are either free or have free trials, the program is remarkably uncommercial and definitely worth the modest time investment.
“Revive your Inbox” reviews best practices for dealing with the constant deluge of email. They’ve done a nice job of breaking the material up into bite-size chunks (10-20 minutes to work through each day’s assignment) arranged in a thoughtful pedagogical arc. Lessons come in Outlook and Gmail versions, with occasional nods to other email clients.
My only complaint is that there’s no “pause” button on the program to slow its delivery into your inbox. I prefer to stay away from email on the weekends; and if I’d attempted this program during a teaching semester, I would have wanted to attempt only 2 or 3 segments per week. While the lessons give the student tools to deal with just such an email situation, ironically, those tools come later in the program!
If you find that you’ve got too much email coming your way, give this program a try!