Reasonable 'decluttering' advice from Wild On...Usabilty's own host, Jakob Nielsen
For all of you who (somewhat rightly) argue Nielsen complains about technology but never suggests improvements: his Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution offers some guidance you probably shouldn't ignore, no matter where you are in the digital workplace. I for one believe his best advice in this piece is evergreen: "write short" and "don't use Reply to All." These are tips that I so wish people would remember the next time they're buried in their own inbox, wondering how things got that way. Just stopping to ask "does this person really need to see my reply?" probably would cut email clutter by a third or half if practiced across any sizeable organization. Being as brief as possible in the actual reply would be a godsend as well.
You know what? It would be kind of cool to have some sort of incentive for email efficiency that could be tracked by server-wide scoring system. The hard part would be reconciling a specific employees' email frequency/message length with measured business results or productivity. But I bet that somewhere in the fuzzy math is a score generator that would be at minimum fun-to-know, at maximum directly rewarding to those who write x% smarter than their peers.