I love social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, but they send an awful lot of notification e-mails. I get an e-mail every time someone comments on my blog; I get an e-mail every time someone follows me on Twitter. On my birthday, I got 63 e-mails from Facebook! Now, I’m not complaining about getting birthday wishes, and I like to review these other e-mails from time to time; but filtering them into little folders off to the side of my inbox is just too distracting. I want my inbox to have IMPORTANT STUFF in it, and I don’t want the tempation to poke around in these little folders every once in awhile.

I know that I can save myself alot of time and distraction if I just put these e-mails somewhere far, far away, so I’m going to filter them to an entirely new account. Then, I can set up a schedule to manage them in “batches”. Maybe I’ll check the account once a day, maybe three times a week. Maybe once a week. What’s important is that they will be far away from the more important e-mails that go directly into my inbox.

If e-mails from social networking sites are distracting you I’m going to show a special trick to get them out of your way. Check out this screencast.