One of the most common cliches heard (especially around the holidays) nowadays is "TMI," which of course means "too much information." In short, we’re all overloaded.

For most people in business, a huge part of the TMI equation is handling a constant stream of emails, of which only a few are important. For those people who manage to keep their email at work and never read messages at home, this is a problem on Monday morning.

Because of this phenomenon, one periodically sees news stories about businesses or organizations "turning off email" to be more effective. This seems to me to be a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Spam and marketing messages (spam by another name) make up an amazing 80 percent to 90 percent of email traffic on the Internet.

By now it should be clear that this is the same issue we have everywhere, with higher volumes of information coming at us as we are always online. To put it simply, the problem of having too much information is not necessarily a problem.

So how do you filter out the "real" messages from the trash?

The dilemma is having too little information management. Effective information management just takes some planning.

First, you need to determine how much information you want and then how much different information you can handle. You can use email filtering services that monitor your email for you, but they cost money. The tools are readily available to manage your own. Here are some basic tips on setting up your own management system to control your information.

Make the most of your junk email filters. All email clients or Web services provide some level of automatic junk filtering. (Some, such as Gmail, have really good anti-spam filters.) If you don’t pay attention, however, you might discover too late that one of your clients (now ex-client) has been relegated to the junk folder for the past month. It is worth the time to make sure to add anyone who is of any importance to you to your contacts so they are not filtered.

The biggest problem is your inbox.

We regularly see Outlook inboxes with 50,000 messages. You need to reserve your top-level inbox for things you know you want to see. To do this, create folders in your inbox and set up basic, general rules to move low-priority or special-interest email to these folders.

This does take some planning because you don’t want too many rules, and the rules have to be broad enough so you don’t have too many folders. A basic rule keeps only people, organizations, domains and newsletters from people in your contact list in your inbox and moves everything else to a "check later" folder.

With a little planning and the use of some basic rules, you can be the one to make the call on whether an email is interesting or just junk. Why let someone or something else decide everything for you?

Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now runs Islanda Managed Cloud Services, based in Honolulu. Reach him at mike.meyer@islandatech.com.