Keeping atop the flood of emails that hit your box every day is an important business step.

The email a perspective customer or client sends you is often the first “contact” they will have with your business after visiting your Website/storefront. Keeping them waiting for a week for you to catch up with your email sends a terrible first impression (alternately, I’ve found that  responding within thirty seconds, while largely impractical, always will impress the hell out of them)..

Lifehacker has a list of top 10 email productivity tips online that is at the very least worth a read, although I bet you’ll be incorporating at least a couple into your email routine today. We’ll leave you a taste with #7:

7. Process email in batches. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies when it comes to email clutter. Sending “before I forget” messages on off hours, reading email when there’s no time to act on it, and having loose reading and responding schedules all contribute to that feeling of being under a high-volume waterfall.