I almost missed “Clean Out Your Inbox Week.”

That’s because the announcement didn’t come as an e-mail. I read about the event in a news story. If I’d received the info in an e-mail, I would have known it much sooner. That is if I could find that e-mail in my inbox.

Marsha Egan, author of “Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-Mail Excellence” (Acanthus 2009), announced that Jan. 25-29, was Clean Out Your Inbox Week. I think this is a worthy goal for every week, so don’t let the fact that we’re a few days behind keep you from embracing the concept.

Egan says we’re all spending too much time reading e-mail and sorting e-mail and re-reading e-mail and trying to find e-mails. I know you know what I mean.

The news release announcing the week says that 247 billion e-mails are sent each day. Sometimes it seems like about half of those e-mails are in my inbox.

So what does Egan say we can do? She has that book to tell us more, but here are a three suggestions:

1. Set times for checking your e-mail every day. Egan says most of us are not using our work time efficiently, as we let e-mail throw us off the track of a work project. We’re working away and “Bing — You’ve got mail.” We open the mail and see some other task we are being asked to do or a date to put on the calendar or a question to answer, and we’re derailed from what we had set as a work priority for that particular time. Egan says to check your mail five times a day at the most.

2. When you do read e-mail, deal with each e-mail right then — delete, flag to deal with later, or move to a folder. She says we waste a lot of time reading and rereading some of the same e-mails.

3. Clean out your inbox. For most of us, this would be impossible to do in one session. She says to spend no more than an hour at a time on this mission.

Enough blogging…I need to check my e-mail.