Let technology tame your inbox

Employees spend an average of 13 hours a week reading and responding to email, according to The McKinsey Global Institute. That’s absurd, especially when you think about how much meaningful work you could do in 13 hours.

Luckily technology can alleviate some of the burden. Follow these tips:

Use your email program to its full potential. Outlook, Gmail and others allow you to set up rules, labels and more, making it easy to organize your email. Take the tutorials or Google “ hacks,” so you can take advantage of all the program’s features.

Invest in apps that will filter messages for you. Spark and Sanebox, for example, recognize and filter out your most important emails, from secondary content and SPAM.

Eliminate unnecessary messages. Unroll.me is a free service that makes it super easy for you to unsubscribe from any newsletters or other emails that you don’t want. For ones you want to receive, you can merge them into a daily digest that arrives when you want it.