During the past week I have been purging my electronic clutter, old files and software no longer needed and specifically, my email. Mixing this with my other day to day chores has been a challenge.

Like most bloggers and entrepreneurs, I have quite a few email accounts set-up for various purposes. I set out to get all of them cleaned up by the end of 2009 but life, as often happens, got in the way.

The next thing I know the New Year had arrived and I had hardly started on this project, which was quite substantial.

I use Gmail for most of my business accounts because it’s free, easy to use, and you get tons of storage space (7.2 Gigs) for each account. Now you know how the email thing goes, you get so many during the course of the day that you find yourself cherry-picking the really high priority and important ones first, leaving the others to get back to a little later.

The fact that I had so many emails to get back to began to bother me and it had gotten to a point where I knew I had to do something. It is a new year and this was gnawing at me, so drastic action had to be taken.

So I rearranged my normal work schedule to spend the required hours upon hours each day to clear away this backlog from my inbox, my mind and my life. I can tell you that I am now so refreshed and ready to rock and roll for 2010 that I just had to write this post about the experience.

This may sound like a small thing but when you have multiple accounts that accumulate 20 to 40 emails daily, and each account has an inbox with numbers in the thousands, let’s be honest, this **** is out of hand.

This situation has caused me to add another goal for 2010, and that is to implement a highly efficient email management system to avoid recurrence.

My old system was to set aside blocks of time to keep the numbers manageable but obviously I flubbed at that along the way.

This is where you can help me out.

What systems or techniques do you find most effective for managing your email?

Yeah I know, no system will help me if I fail to read them in the first place, but the sheer numbers had overwhelmed my efforts.

If you would kindly leave me some suggestions in the comments section, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!