How about you?

phil_style,

Unfortunately e-mail is not the least important form of communication. It is almost the only form these days at the University and in the larger community. We are close to paperless. I interact with journals, meetings, administration, funding agencies, colleagues, get requests for review, letters of recommendation (sent and received), notification of funding, notification of policy, invitations to speak,... all via e-mail - exclusively.

Folders, people. Especially if you're stuck with Outlook, like I am for work. Folders, and then folders within folders. It's all there if you need it. I also recommend Google Desktop, so you can search your own stuff effectively.

For my Gmail personal account, I tag stuff that matters and archive it after it goes past the 50 that show up on one page. Everything else (Facebook reminders, spam, etc) gets deleted. I'm still only using 1% of the storage. Plus they have that new autopilot feature ;)

Facebook is overtaking email as the primary means of communication for many people. It's growing at a million people every two days... I now spend as much time checking Facebook as I do checking email.

I'm even thinking of discontinuing our church e-news to put those resources on Facebook. It's much more interactive, and I can be a daily part of people's lives without "spamming" them. Not to mention that we have more FB friends than we do email subscribers.

That being said, it's awful hard to stop any kind of communication once it gets going.