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 

BizSlate unveiled a supply-chain management tool for small medium-sized businesses today.

Until recently, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been an expensive, complicated proposition, offered by the likes of SAP, Oracle, and Sage to large companies that can afford multi-hundred-thousand-dollar packages and consulting contracts that can run into millions of dollars.

But small businesses have supply chains, too, and getting a handle on what’s where is an increasingly important competitive point in the global marketplace.

BizSlate’s ERP solution offers small businesses, typically with 100 employees or fewer, the ability to monitor and diagnose supply chain and operational issues as efficiently as larger companies, but with a lower cost. It’s a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, delivered over the internet. Among the features BizSlate offers are support for the following:

• Placing orders to factories for products
• Receiving products into inventory
• Receiving customer purchase orders
• Generating sales orders and fulfillment documents
• Printing pick tickets, packing slips, and shipping labels
• Shipping products to customers
• Creating customer invoices
• Automatically syncing with QuickBooks for general ledger and financial reporting purposes

BizSlate unveiled its ERP solution today at the DEMO Spring 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

CEO Mark Kalman

“It is exciting to fulfill our mission of helping [small and medium businesses] overcome the challenges they face managing their supply chain,” said cofounder and chief executive Mark Kalman (pictured) in an email to VentureBeat. “SMBs need to remain agile, they need rapid access to key information from anywhere in the world, and they need to maximize efficiency in their warehouse and back-office.”

Although it’s delivered over the internet, BizSlate’s technology is based on Java and Oracle on the back end. The company has raised a total of $370,000 to date from Kalman and from BizSlate’s 19-company customer steering committee, each of which contributed an average of $18,000.

These customers have been instrumental in helping BizSlate develop its ERP offering, Kalman said, providing input, guidance, and feedback from the company’s earliest stages.

Previously, Kalman was co-founder and chief executive of eZCom Software Inc., a SaaS Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) provider focused on helping SMBs streamline supply chain operations around EDI relationships. While at eZCom, he realized that almost half of his customers were using QuickBooks and were having difficulty integrating their own supply chains with Intuit’s tool. He left eZCom to start BizSlate in October, 2011.

The company is based in New York, New York.

BizSlate is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo and screenshot courtesy BizSlate.