This is a guest post by entrepreneur Dmitri Leonov

Everybody I know is suffering from email overload, but entrepreneurs have it especially bad. There are about 50 hours of work in a 24 hour day, and email becomes a huge chunk of it.

All of us have tried to get better at email. For those that aren’t glued to their smartphones and check our inbox at set times during the day, it feels like never enough.

While developing a company to help busy folk manage their email, I have thought long and hard about optimal email workflow, and have come up with an extensive list of rules and tips. It will require a substantial shift in your thinking about email, but this rule will change your life: don’t make clearing your Inbox your top priority.

There’s an inherent gamification in clearing your inbox. It feels productive and provides a brief feeling of accomplishment. But as we all know, this feeling is not only fleeting, but has a dangerous flip-side — processing email is a reactive activity. When you let other people set your priorities, you’re not in control of your time, and this should be a deal-breaker for entrepreneurs.

You won’t respond to every email — and that’s okay!

Get comfortable with the idea that some of the emails in your inbox will never get responded to. And that’s ok. Imagine a world where you don’t have to respond to an email just because it’s there. It’s ok if you choose to, but not because someone else decided for you. Feels good, doesn’t it?

Set your priorities

Whenever you sit down to check email, ask yourself, “Is clearing the inbox the best use of my time? Is there really nothing more valuable I can do?” If you can’t find any higher priority things that will actually grow the business, by all means spend time on your email. And if there’s an email that directly aligns with your top priorities, then it’s a win-win for you and your inbox.

It’s completely ok if on some days “Clearing the Inbox” is in your top five to-do’s. In fact, eventually it needs to be. The problem is that email has become the default top-priority without us even realizing it. We spend 28 percent of our time on email but when we think about our priorities, email isn’t even on there.

There are two types of emails:

1. Ones that require actual work.
2. Ones that just need to be “dealt with” (responded to, forwarded, filed etc).

While we tend to be more afraid of the former because nobody likes more work, the sheer volume of the unimportant mail adds up. Research on interruptions shows that the second kind are very harmful to productivity — it takes 1.5 minutes to read and recover from an average email. Since most email clients and webmail UIs allocate the same amount of screen real estate to each email, our brain is tricked into giving them the same amount of attention.

However, not all emails are created equal: some emails need to be dealt with right away (important/urgent), others can wait until later (important/ non-urgent), and everything else should be processed in bulk (unimportant.) In other words, you should have a prioritization system even within your inbox.

As venture investor Chris Sacca once tweeted, “Your inbox is a to-do list other people can write on. Focus on your own to-do list. Stay on the offensive.”

Dmitri Leonov leads business development, sales and marketing efforts at SaneBox. Prior to Sanebox, hefounded Wanto, a social networking app which brings together people with common goals. Previously Dmitri spent several years at Overture (acquired by Yahoo) in a number of sales strategy and business development roles. He was responsible for launching Yahoo’s Global Reseller Channel, and led business development efforts in Emerging Markets. Dmitri graduated from UC Berkeley with a BS in Finance.

Top image via Shutterstock 

Chicago-based firm New World Ventures made its largest-ever investment in a startup today.

The 15-year-old firm has poured $50 million into IO, a provider of data center services. IO initially asked for $75 million but had to take it up to a higher amount ($90 million) to satisfy internal investors. Jon Mauck, IO’s CFO, told me during a phone interview that this “pre-IPO” round was highly over-subscribed.

Mauck said the Phoenix Arizona company will use the funds to extend its salesforce in Asia and Europe and to expand its research and development program. Recently, it partnered with investment banking giant Goldman Sachs. Goldman will deploy modules in IO data centers  in Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S.

“Their innovative technology and services will allow Goldman Sachs to scale its data center operations more efficiently and further advance the firm’s broader commitment to environmental stewardship and reduced carbon footprint,” Don Duet, global co-chief operating officer of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs told Data Center Knowledge last month.

It’s a green solution for enterprises, but is also a huge market opportunity.”We have something that is fairly unique and are are addressing the infrastructure portion of the IT stack,” said Mauck.

Traditionally, enterprises have wildly overbuilt their data centers to ensure they never go offline — they were overspending to play it safe. With its software, IO is providing real-time analytics and feedback to improve the use of the space so companies can optimize their infrastructure.

According to Mouck, construction prices have increased 900 percent since 1968. As a result, IO also offers data center hosting services and competes with companies like Digital Realty. The company is not yet profitable from a net income standpoint so it can built out its hosting capabilities but is on track for an IPO in the next two years.

“From the moment we saw this product, we knew it would revolutionize the industry,” said Chris Girgenti, New World Ventures’ managing partner and newly-appointed member of the company’s Board of Directors in a statement.

Image via Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Precog launched at the Strata Conference in February, and developers across a variety of verticals are already using the beta version. Eli Portnoy, CEO of ThinkNear, which offers hyper-local mobile display ads within 100m of any location, is using Precog’s beta to capture thousands of interactions per second, and then surface targeted insights to advertisers.

Kirill Sheynkman, senior director of RTP Ventures, which led a $2 million funding round announced today, said there has been an investor frenzy around big data, but Precog is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the exploding market.

Importantly, Precog can analyze the growing amount of unstructured and semi-structured data like texts, tweets, and emails that offer a potential gold mine for application vendors.

“For an investor who spent 20 years building data-centric infrastructure businesses, seeing something shiny in big data’s murky waters was an epiphany,” said Sheynkman, who will join the board of directors alongside SendGrid CEO, Jim Franklin.

Precog chief executive John De Goes built the company to create the world’s first data intelligence-as-a-service offering. Application developers (ISVs) are becoming more savvy about leveraging data, but it can take months, or even years, to build a full infrastructure in-house.

He said the company aspires to be the Twilio of the space, referencing a company known for its dead-simple APIs. “We provide application vendors with the ability to solve any problem in data analysis without having to write piles of code,” he said.

De Goes has come a long way since being selected for the Boulder class of TechStars in 2011. Shortly after graduating from the startup accelerator, De Goes closed a seed round for ReportGrid, which provides SaaS vendors with nifty data visualization tools.

In addition to RTP Ventures, Resonate Venture Partners and TechStars‘ founder David Cohen also participated in Boulder-based Precog’s new funding round.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage provider Box.net today announced it has closed an $81 million extension to its fourth round of funding, which includes new investors New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The new round gives Box.net, which has evolved into a provider of back-end storage on remote servers for enterprise applications, a lot of cash to make a mad grab in what has become a land rush in the enterprise software space. Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie said the funding will go toward research and development, staffing and other kinds of “marketable” expansion plans. That’s the kind of expansion that’s highly visible and makes it obvious that the company is growing quickly.

Box.net’s latest round gives the company a valuation well north of $600 million, compared to recent filings that suggest the company is worth around $550 million. Earlier this year, Levie turned down a buyout offer for the company that was worth $500 million, as we reported in October, before the company’s first Boxworks conference based in San Francisco, Calif.

In addition to expanding the company’s research and development, Box.net is also starting the “innovation network,” a third-party development community of sorts that uses Box.net as a storage back-end for enterprise applications. Levie said he hopes that any enterprise application developer — large or small — can walk in with his or her specific application and wrap it around Box.net’s cloud storage. Levie wouldn’t disclose any new details about the financial agreements the company would make with developers, but those should emerge sometime later this year.

Box.net will also build a third data center for the company, though Levie said Box.net hasn’t experienced any kind of strain on its networks. The deals with Salesforce.com and SAP were both strategic, meaning the companies will be working together on software in some way.

The enterprise cloud storage provider has more than 7 million users, and 77 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed its service in some form. Around half of the $162 million the company has raised to date is still in the bank, investors in the company told me. Even with that much cash around, Levie said there’s still a chance that the company could seek additional funding in the future — though his investors want him to take the company public.

“Obviously, if I’ve learned anything it’s not to say that this will be the last round,” Levie said. “We’re always on the lookout for a good deal.”

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

For a more in-depth look at how Aaron Levie runs Box.net and how the company got its start, check out this VentureBeat profile from earlier this month.

Apperian lets users quickly access any application built or deployed by their company, and they can log in with a corporate email and password. The list of apps available to them is customized by the company — users in a sales group can only see sales applications, for example. They can also access the company help desk through the application. Apperian users can also download company applications without having to sync the iPhone with a computer, like typical enterprise applications require.

While apps developed by a company for the iPhone and iPad do not typically appear on the Apple App Store, they still have to go through an approval process like other apps. Many companies have already begun their transition to tablets for field work and other corporate necessities. About 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have already begun testing or deploying applications for Apple’s iPad tablet.

Part of this latest round of funding came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ iFund, a $200 million investment fund geared toward mobile startups. North Bridge Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding up to $11 million.