Adobe did a 2018 consumer email survey where they asked people about their email habits. People report being in their email at least 3.1 hours a day. They also asked where, outside of work, are you checking emails? The most frequent response was “watching TV.” No. 2 was while in bed, followed by while in the bathroom, during a meal with others, while working out and a formal ceremony.

Email is so hard. It takes 11 seconds to deal with an email, on average. But here’s a tool that will help: Unroll.me. It goes into your web-based email and it finds all of your subscriptions and then it lines them up for you.

There's a difference in the email world between spam and bacon, just like in real life. Spam we don't want. Bacon is stuff we want, but we can't have it every day because it just clogs everything up. Bacon is that update from your kid's school that you don't get around to reading, so you save it. Then you get to the end of the day and you somehow have 8,000 or 9,000 emails. There's no way you're going to get through them. So Unroll.me will put them all on the list and then you can do a one-click unsubscribe. It will also let you digest the bacon that you want comes throughout the day — notifications, updates, newsletters you like. You can digest them and put them in one email. Then you can just very quickly scan one email a day.

For my book, I researched relentlessly email access tools, email platform tools, to find the best ones for mobile devices. By far the top for me was Gmail. What Gmail does is it organizes things very easily. The biggest benefit was the junk mail filter and the spam filter. I get no spam in my regular inbox. Gmail doesn't let any of it through. It's also the most versatile option. I can put everything into Gmail’s infrastructure and then use it different places rather than having to reconfigure everything. I have five or six different email addresses, all in Gmail, and I configure them so that I can send and receive from Gmail from all of them rather than having to go back and forth.

Now for apps on the phone, Microsoft Outlook app is one of my favorites. The Microsoft Outlook app, even if you're not in the Microsoft infrastructure, is a free app you can use. You can get all your emails in the app and it's got all kinds of extras to save you time. For example, has anybody ever written to you and said, "Hey, can you meet at 2:00?" You're like, "Oh, let me go check my calendar." You have to get out of your email app and go into your calendar app to check the time. The Microsoft Outlook app has the calendar and scheduling and attachment tools all built in so you don't have to leave.

Sometimes you can email someone a dozen times and they will never write back, but you text them once and get a response within three seconds. There is a tool that combines those two different strategies, called Spike. One person writes an email and sends it. To the other person, the format looks like texting. Then the other person writes a text back and it comes back as an email. They can send pictures or files, and all of it is in the chosen format. The other person doesn't see that they’re just texting. They just see that they’re answering their emails. It includes the signature and everything.

So how about the situation where you’re out of the office at an event or meeting, and you’re taking notes, learning things, but nothing is stopping in your world. You're getting emails right and left. FollowUpThen is a tool that will help you manage the email flow. So you get an email, but you don't have to deal with it. With FollowUpThen, you could tell it to send it to you on a certain day and time when you’re back in the office. It will come back into your inbox when you need it, so that you can triage things and get them out of your inbox.

Let's say you're waiting for a client to give you some information so you can put a quote together. But you have to have that information by Tuesday in order to get to them by Thursday, and you write to them and say, “I need this by Tuesday.” You can put in a reminder that will let you know if they have not written you back on Tuesday. If they write you back, the reminder goes away. But if they haven't written you back, it will ping you and say, “Hey, you haven't gotten a reply on this that you need,” so you can follow up.

Beth Ziesenis has been featured on best speaker lists by Meetings & Conventions magazine and MeetingsNet. Since her first Commodore 64 computer, Zeisenis has made a verb out of the word nerd. She helps computer users all over the country filter through thousands of apps and gadgets to find the perfect free and bargain technology tools for business and personal use.