• I stopped seeing it as separate from my "real work." In the information economy, email is real work. So I made a conscious decision to stop looking at email as something that took me away from important work and start viewing it as part of building  relationships - something that's really important to me. Once I made this mindset shift, it was easier to make time for email.

• I stopped using email to manage my to-do list. This post describes my pre-conversion life pretty well: I'd leave important messages marked as unread to remember to come back to them later (but then they'd get buried by new messages fairly quickly) and I'd email to-do lists to myself. Having tried paper to-do lists and several different task tracking apps (including one that transformed my list into a quest - though I never advanced beyond "Junior Ent Sapling") I've finally settled on Trello, which is super-simple and has a fantastic app/desktop integration.

• I stopped allowing days of back-to-back meetings. I used to let my calendar get filled up with meetings; at the end of the day, I would return to an inbox filled with hundreds of unread messages and a sinking feeling in my heart. I tried to fight back by blocking out large chunks of my calendar a couple of times a week, but my coworkers, seeing a 2-hour "meeting" in my calendar would know it was a fake and book me anyway. Now I book 30-min or 1-hour meetings at random times throughout my week, so that I always have about two hours "free" per day. (Try to catch me now, suckers!)

• Two weeks before I go on vacation, I put the dates I'll be away in my email signature. This is a much better way of giving colleagues a heads-up than a mass email message, which few people will read or remember, and it lets me deal with last-minute requests before I leave so that I can fully disconnect while I'm away. 

What didn't work:

• Checking email at certain times of the day only. This frequently suggested tactic has never worked for me. When I've tried, I end up reading and answering email straight through until my next appointed "check-in" time; or I get left out of important online conversations happening among my colleagues between my check-in times; or I miss timely messages.

• Aiming for Inbox Zero. I think we will look back on the brief craze for Inbox Zero the way we now look back at the 80s aerobics craze: evidence of a mad and ultimately warping desire for perfection. Inboxes are not meant to be at zero any more than women's upper thighs are meant to look like aluminum tubes. I now aim to keep the unread messages in my inbox to the double-digits. When things start ballooning up, I sigh, get into to work a little earlier, and hammer away at them until they're back down to size - the same way I reluctantly (but temporarily) switch from pastrami to arugula when my favorite jeans feel tight.

• Following the "only handle it once," rule. This is a really difficult one for most knowledge workers, not only editors. Thinking takes time. Sometimes even answering a simple yes-or-no question means asking for other people's input, doing background reading, or conducting a bit of research. I can usually make those judgment calls fairly efficiently - or else I wouldn't be good at my job - but I can't do it obeying the "OHIO" rule.

• Setting up elaborate folder systems. How can a person who barely has time to read her email possibly have time to sort it? That's what the search box is for.

• Asking other people to change their behavior. I did try asking people to put key information in the subject line, use the Red Exclamation Point of Doom if - and only if - it was truly an urgent message, or to send me one email with all of their questions rather than five short emails each with a different query. Despite the efforts of a few (which I appreciated!), by and large this was a predictably Quixotic quest.

• Complaining. Treating email like the enemy made important people hesitant to email me; I'd be left out of important conversations because, "Sarah's always so busy." Instead of being able to dip in and out of the discussion based on what I thought was important, people started turning off the spigot. I was not a fan of that, as it turned out.