How big is your inbox?

Forget the executive parking space or the big corner office, these days your importance is measured by the size of your inbox.

The bigger the better seems to be the modern mantra, according to Dr Monica Seeley, a leading IT coach to senior execs.

Seeley claims that a cluttered inbox is the new macho thing to boast about - and competition is fierce.

Those getting more than 100 emails per day were seen to be more important than those only receiving 25 to 50 emails, even though the majority of those 100 emails were completely useless.

Even more interestingly is Seeley's theory that men seem to enjoy moaning about the amount of mail they receive and do very little to cut down on the trivia.

An easy way to do this, said one silicon.com reader, is to not send on chain letters. "They are an absolute curse," he said.

Time spent replying to your bulging inbox can be cut down providing you are economical with your words, said Dr Seeley.

Men are good at this as they tend to be more terse and succinct, added Seeley.

silicon.com reader Ian Traynor has a failsafe plan for doing this: "Don't open an email more than once. Open it then either reply to it, file it or delete it. Don't close it to come back to it later."

Among silicon.com reader Ahmed Risk's email dos and don'ts is this piece of advice: "Do not reply if all you want to say is 'I agree'" and "Do not saddle your message with unwanted and unnecessary garbage."

According to Seeley's research many (but not all) female users see email as another way to chat and are more likely to engage in verbose conversations with colleagues - a particular pet hate of silicon.com readers.

As Nicky Harvey points out: "Try not to use company email to send jokes and large attachments. It wastes productivity and also eats up bandwidth, minimising network performance."

But not all women should be tarred with the same brush. Maria Casu, CRM marketing manager at Sun, urges all users to "make clarity and brevity your mantra".

Ironically though, Seeley said attempts by women to adopt a more masculine approach to email results in them being labelled cold and authoritarian.

Sending emails instead of having a face to face conversation results in their devaluation. The more emails execs receive, the more likely it is they go unread.

But for many, the devaluation is a result of email being viewed as the electronic version of "school note passing" rather than a faster, more efficient way to communicate business matters.

This, said Seeley, will lead to a shift towards using other technologies such as instant messaging.

Seeley claims instant messaging will become the norm for informal communication and one-liners currently cluttering email severs.

Email is now a bit like the first Model T Ford Motor car - it works well and is very useful but we need different modes of transport and extra gadgets for different purposes, she said.

The adoption of a more ruthless email policy would help people cut down on the amount of messages that need to be dealt with on a daily basis. Delegation is key to remaining stress-free. This means not being afraid to tailor your inbox by eliminating or filing non-urgent emails or better still pass it on to someone else - size isn't everything.