Social Media leads to more time spent on emails, according to a new study by Nielsen (Found via Mashable).

Apparently heavy social media users spend much more time consuming email each day, and it seems to only be increasing judging by the study. There’s no inference whether this is a good or bad thing, but the question I’d be asking is whether it’s also affected the amount of time spent on the telephone, in meetings etc. I probably spend less time on the telephone now than at any point in my life, and yet I’m keeping in contact with far more people on a far more regular basis than ever before.

How to tackle the email increase:

Nielsen and Mashable both point to the sign-up and notification emails as being the biggest cause of the email influx – but there’s a really, really simple solution.

In addition to my two main email accounts (work and personal), I have an account at OtherInbox which has been utterly fantastic at keeping all the notifications etc out of my way unless I actually need them.

Put simply, Other Inbox is web-based mail, but rather than the normal email address, you get an @username.otherinbox.com address (so mine is @badgergravling.otherinbox.com or @badgergravling.oib.com – cheers for the tip Tim). All I then do is insert the name of the social media site (or anything else I fancy) as my email address – so thewayoftheweb@badgergravling.otherinbox.com.

When that address is emailed by the site, Other Inbox automatically creates a folder of the same name and files every email from the site in the right folder.

So anything likely to clog your inbox gets filtered, filed, and saved for 30 days with a free account (paid accounts are really cheap and worthwhile for permanent archives). And you can integrate it with Gmail, access via IMAP etc, etc.

End result – a far less cluttered inbox every day, and storage for those set-up emails you’ll realise you need in two year’s time.