As the editor of a very busy website, my email inbox is close to exploding. Just when I think I have got on top of it all, along comes another 20-30 emails to wreck my cunning plans for total email dominance.

As you can probably imagine, I don’t intend to send myself into a total nervous breakdown because of emails, so I have gradually worked out some email personal productivity tactics to try and maintain the semblance of being in control of it all.

1) Switch to Gmail (if you already haven’t) – Gmail is the most superior email service out there. It lets us test experimental insanely useful features like Priority Inbox and also gives us a fantastic spam control system, labels and filters.

Nothing else comes close to beating what they offer – and it’s all free (provided you don’t mind seeing some adverts next to your emails – but trust me, eventually you don’t even notice they are there). Using Gmail, you can pretty much kiss goodbye to 95% or more of spam and if anything does slip through, you can zap it with a single mouse click. The labels and filters they provide also help you to arrange everything into their own special folders, making everything highly organized.

2) Don’t always check your emails – If there’s one thing guaranteed to drive you mad, it’s those automatic email checkers that ping you every time there is an email. Those things are the worst thing you could ever install as they literally chain you to your email 24/7. Think about it – every time you hear that ping, you come running to see what the email is. Then, when you try to walk away again, suddenly “ping!” and you’re back again. The answer – uninstall these productivity monsters and only check your emails at set times in the day. The rest of the time, shut your email down and walk away.

3) Use Boomerang to get rid of unimportant stuff – How many emails come into your inbox which you don’t need to see right away? Maybe it’s a dinner reservation for next week or a job interview for 2 weeks time. But you don’t want it sitting there in your inbox, annoying you and clogging up your inbox. The answer? Use Boomerang - which will take the unimportant stuff out of your Gmail inbox and deliver it back to you at exactly the right time you need it. The app is also available for Microsoft Outlook users.

4) Use templates for repetitive stuff – How many times do you send out the same email time after time, repeating the same text over and over? A waste of time right? Well, keep emails in your drafts folder with the text and next time you need to send out that exact same email, just copy and paste the text from the email in drafts and copy it into your new email window.

5) Encourage people to contact you outside email – This may be counter-productive for some, but perhaps encouraging people to contact you via Facebook or Twitter might help ease the email inbox problem? Twitter is good because it forces people to be concise and stick to the 140 character limit. Or picking up the phone and calling you instead always works. Failing all that, nothing beats good old human contact and interaction.

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Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer of 20 years experience, and also the managing editor of MakeUseOf.com, since August 2007. You can see his personal website at markoneill.org Mark has 17 post(s) at Free Writing Center