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With the advent of mobile devices and smartphones, all hopes of leaving email at the office door have been dashed to pieces and the dividing line between work and home has blurred considerably. Add to this the current culture of employers expecting their employees to stay plugged in and available 24 x7 and you have not just circles under your eyes, but also chronic fatigue, depression and eventually, burnout to look forward to.

Some countries seem to be taking this lopsided work-life balance issue seriously. As early as 2012, Brazil passed a law requiring employers to provide overtime pay to employees who answered emails from their bosses in their downtime. France is currently trying to pass laws that require employers to schedule fixed times when work emails and other communication cannot be sent to employees. But what if you didn’t live in either of these countries? How else could you cope?

Here are 5 tools that can help you get email off your back, save you time and effort with your inbox and significantly improve your productivity while at it:

1. Unroll.me
   Unroll.me is God’s gift to those who are engulfed by newsletters and subscriptions that threaten to swallow their inbox whole, but still cannot bring themselves to unsubscribe from them in the hope that something interesting will come their way some day. Unfortunately, this means having to sort through a whole lot of rubbish before you can find emails that actually require your attention and response. Unroll.me solves this problem by working like an inbox proxy. It syncs these messages to their servers and archives them away from your inbox. Now you can choose to either simply unsubscribe from these messages or have them delivered to you at regular intervals in the more easily consumable digest form, saving you precious time in the bargain.
2. Cold Turkey / Freedom
   Going on vacation? We suggest a digital detox. Services like Cold Turkey and Freedom are meant to block digital distractions during working hours, but they can also be used to save you from your own worst enemy – yourself. That’s right. If you can’t resist checking your email during your downtime, simply engage either of these services to block you out from your mailbox for the period of your vacation. Then sit back and enjoy yourself!
3. FewClix
   So you had a great vacation without your email. But did you spend time worrying about the deluge of messages that would be waiting back home for you? Have no fear. FewClix is here! With FewClix installed, there is no need to sort through your email, file them away in folders or hunt for priority messages. You can find unread email, emails from VIPs, emails that you haven’t responded to, pending meeting invites, etc. with just a couple of clicks. In fact, you will never need to organize or worry about what’s arriving in your mailbox in your absence ever again!

Click here to get the FREE FewClix Personal Edition and stay in control of your mailbox without deleting or filing away a single email!