By J.J. Rosen, an EO Nashville member and CEO of Atiba

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by your inbox, read on.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the average worker is sent more than 11,500 emails a year. Reading, replying to and prioritizing thousands of messages that accumulate year after year is challenging for even the most organized among us. Between email, voicemail, social media, texts, phone calls, video conferencing and instant messaging, modern communication is super immediate and super voluminous, but not always super efficient.

Communication is no doubt an essential pillar of success for any business; however, the ability to communicate with anyone, anytime and anywhere is by its nature disruptive. Balancing the productivity gains of email with the productivity losses of email is a real issue for individual employees and corporations as a whole.

Email started as nothing more that a way to send messages back and forth. The proliferation of smartphones, high-speed bandwidth and cheap data storage has expanded the number and kind of functions email provides. It now serves as a courier, to-do list, document management system, meeting scheduler and, for many of us, a vast and teeming personal archive.

However, the movement from physical desktops and servers to hosted cloud-based “services” is slowly changing both the usage and role of email. There is an ongoing battle between Google and Microsoft to own the future of email and communication in general.

Learn what the future holds for email, and what you can do to better manage your messages…