One of the first questions we ask potential new clients is “What are the major pain points in your business right now?” Without exception, one of the top five, usually the top three, is their email inbox.

Now don’t get me wrong, email can feel like treading water at times. It’s defeating to stay up late to get your inbox emptied at midnight only to awake at 6:00am and see it’s already overflowing again. But, there are a few ways to ease the pain of email. Here are three foolproof tips we work through with all of our clients:

#1 Stop Using Your Inbox as Your Task List

I need you to trust me on this one, it doesn’t work! What inevitably ends up happening is your open and read an email three, four, five times before actually doing something with it. So, find yourself a good to-do list system and put your tasks there, don’t leave them sitting in your inbox. We LOVE ToDoIst for this purpose. Bonus: With their gmail integration, you can create a task from an email in about two clicks!

#2 Stop Using Email to Communicate with your Team

“What?! You want me to stop sending emails to people on my team? How will I ever communicate with them?” Yes, yes I do. Let me introduce you to a brilliant tool called Slack. Think of Slack as a virtual office, conference table, and water cooler. It’s one of the fastest growing tech companies right now for a reason – it’s brilliant. It is a more organized, work friendly version of group messaging. But, instead of long, hard to follow email threads that inevitably contain a lot of fluff, you can communicate only the necessary information in a central place for the entire team to access. (More in depth post on Slack coming soon!)

#3 Start Using Filters

Setting up email filters, especially if you are a Gmail/Google Apps user, is not the least bit hard. It takes a few extra seconds, but saves you hours down the road. Example: If you like to get several email newsletters or deals from your favorite brands, set up filters to have those emails automatically go to a folder. Then, create yourself a task to check those folder once, twice, three times a week. Or maybe you put an hour of “read email newsletters” on your calendar each week. Either way, the auto filters keep them out of your daily vision so they’re not distracting you from emails that actually require a response.

Which of these tips are you going to start using? Do you have another tip that has made you an email inbox ninja? We’d love to hear it!