Email Assault

I was meeting with a fellow small business owner today at his office and everything took took twice as long as it should have because his phone kept going off every five seconds. I asked him how he dealt with it, and he said he just hired someone part time to handle his phone calls and screen his emails. I asked with particular interest because it's starting to happen to me...badly.

I get many more phone calls than I used to, but the real assault is coming from email. iPrioritize gets customer service questions and suggestions for improvement, SportsLizard gets requests for advertising and questions about customizing or purchasing collectibles, this blog yields some emails from fellow YE's, and I get several requests at a time for SEO work. I have spent hours each day answering emails this week. When you have 10-20 emails a day that all require well thought out responses, it takes a lot of time away from your work.

I only check my email every few hours to avoid distractions, and I've got a good filtering system that eliminates most of the junk mail without much effort on my end, but it still doesn't solve the problem of responding to emails. What do you guys do? I know there are a lot of other YE's who have several businesses, so how do you deal with it? I'm going to need to become more efficient, I just haven't figured out how yet.