The days of an instant reply to your message are gone. The recipient has 50 or 60 other messages in line before yours, and unless the tag line is fascinating, your message could be deleted along with many others. Or it could be sent to a folder to be reviewed later.

Of course, if you ask two questions in an email, you are likely to get an answer to just one, the question you care about least.

One systems administrator says if you ask multiple people a question in an email, often nobody responds.

Telephones are looking more convenient than ever. When you reach your party, the information you exchange could help you avoid several email exchanges.

It’s true that you could be directed to voice mail, but once there, the number of calls will be far fewer than the email queue. And the sound of your voice can indicate the importance of the call.

One problem with email is that people love to use it themselves, but they resent it in the hands of CC addicts, joke forwarders, and URL pushers.

Email is here to stay, but sometimes you can save time by seeing a person face-to-face or calling on the phone.

1. Too much neatness takes too much time
2. Clutter can rule your life

A Columbia University management professor says we should forget about being so neat. Stacks of papers may be OK. We shouldn’t fuss over a somewhat messy house, and it’s OK to let all those icons clutter your computer screen.

Eric Abrahamson, author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place (Little, Brown & Co.) says that moderately messy systems outperform extremely orderly ones. With co-author David Freedman, Abrahamson contends that Americans’ obsession with neatness has got us in a state where we are needlessly draining time, money, and emotion from our lives in the hapless pursuit of order.

Filing away loose office papers may not be the best idea, says Abrahamson. People who stack stuff on the desk have intuitive organization that can be effective. Not only are the filed papers hard to find, but remember “out of sight, out of mind.”

Putting off neatening for a time will probably have some advantage, the professor contends. It’s much more efficient to organize a large set of things at once than it is to try to organize them in pieces as they come along. His other advice:

• Make peace with your clutter. As we try to organize everything, clutter creeps back. Accept that.
• Don’t waste time organizing your laptop. Search tools can locate anything.
• Be sloppier with your schedule. A less structured date book makes it easier to adapt to surprises and affords you more freedom.
• Forget filing your CDs by date of artist. Try randomness.
• Your time and energy could be better spent, so don’t try to be so neat.

What do you think? Is it imporrtant to keep your office and home neat? Or can you take Eric Abrahamson’s advice and make peace wiht it? Feel free to coment here.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the other side of the coin: “Clutter can rule your life”.