The email habits of Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and 16 other successful people

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When you receive almost 150 work emails every day, your inbox can quickly become the bane of your existence.

That suffering increases exponentially when you're the leader of a company.

So how do busy people manage their overwhelming inbox flux?

We looked to top executives like Tim Cook and Bill Gates for some answers:

Apple CEO Tim Cook reads most of his 700-plus emails

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Cook wakes up at 3:45 a.m. each day to get a head start on email.

He tells ABC that he receives somewhere between 700 and 800 emails a day, "and I read the majority of those ... Every day, every day. I'm a workaholic."

Ivanka Trump takes email 'offenders' to task

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"As with many things in life, you have to manage your inbox, or it will manage you," the executive vice president of development and acquisitions at The Trump Organization and head of the Ivanka Trump lifestyle brand writes on Fortune.

One strategy she employs to manage email inefficiency is to periodically search her inbox for frequent emailers, identifying those people who send "long, meaty emails that really are better discussed through conversation rather than electronically," and then she sets up a weekly check-in meeting with them to discuss ongoing questions or issues.

Going forward, these people can only email Trump if something is urgent.

"I find that a handful of 'offenders' make up the lion's share of my email overload," she says.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner sends less email to receive less email

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The golden rule for email management, according to Weiner, is, if you want less email, send less email.

He writes on LinkedIn that the rule occurred to him at a previous company when, after two email-happy colleagues left the company, his inbox traffic decreased by almost 30%.

"Turns out, it wasn't just their emails that were generating all of that inbox activity — it was my responses to their emails, the responses of the people who were added to those threads, the responses of the people those people subsequently copied, and so on," Weiner writes.

He continues: "After recognizing this dynamic, I decided to conduct an experiment where I wouldn't write an email unless absolutely necessary. End result: Materially fewer emails and a far more navigable inbox. I've tried to stick to the same rule ever since."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider