Managing Email Realistically
mattgemmell.com
mattgemmell.com
1) Create a folder called "Not Inbox". This folder should not be a sub-folder of the Inbox folder. It should be a sibling. This prevents the mail from being delivered to the inbox on your phone.
2) Log into Outlook Web Access (must be "Premium", not "Lite", so you'll need to boot up your Windows VM and use Internet Explorer)
3) Create a rule that if the message is not addressed to you (ie. Your name on the TO or CC), move that message to the "Not Inbox" folder.
4) Configure the "Not Inbox" folder to purge any message older than 48 hours. Scan senders and subject lines (rarely bodies) in this folder once-ish a day; probably less. If you miss something, it can't possibly be important because it wasn't sent to you. Besides, it was sent to a mailing list, so it will probably come back around when someone replies to the thread.
5) If you notice a pattern in the "Not Inbox", things like useful information about build breaks, feel free to create a rule to send them to another folder, but definitely don't send them to your inbox, even if they are rare. These are things that you want to say "Oh, hey, the build is broken, I wonder if anything broke it" but you still don't want to see a little (1) bubble next to the Mail icon on your phone!
6) Create a folder called "Black hole", also an inbox sibling. Set it's purge rules to the minimum (1 hour?). When you any sort of mail from a non-person, have it sent to this folder. You never ever check this folder, unless you request a password reset or something and expect to find a particular message.
7) Disable all calendar reminders.
8) Every morning, scan the current day for any meetings actually worth your time. "Accept" those. "Decline" any that don't meet the (hopefully very high bar). Do not look past today. Alternatively, do this at the end of the day, looking at tomorrow. If someone schedules a meeting in the morning and expects you to be at it in the afternoon, that's their problem.
9) Direct all non-employees to use your personal email account, which you manage with a different strategy. I use my old startup address for now.
10) Go do actual work. Embrace and nurture your forthcoming reputation as "The guy who never reads his email, yet somehow still shows his face in the most important meetings, and meanwhile outperforms the rest of us, while still going home on time."
I respect not only my own time, but others as well. I expect them to prepare for the meeting, and in some cases that means handouts, agendas, etc that could depend on who is attending. Schedule time to get work done in your calendar, and then you can accept calendar requests in the future with some confidence you'll have time to get stuff done.
The reschedule/schedule the day of shit is crazy annoying though. I use the fullest of my abilities to ignore (re)scheduled meetings within 12 hours unless it actually makes my life easier. 24+ I'm usually more flexible on.
If the meeting is small enough, all critical attendees should be addressed by name. Therefore, it will arrive in your "Inbox" rather than your "Not Inbox" and you'll be able to respond correctly. My scheduling strategy is to avoid "Everyone on Team Foo" meetings, which are pretty much always useless.
Then, urr, it's not working. My inbox is at zero within 30 minutes of starting work each day and within 10 minutes of finishing lunch.
This is the worst email management advice I've ever read.
If it's a task that needs doing, put it in the backlog or task list, and I'll get to it when it's the next task in my list.
I check my email three times a day - when I get in, after lunch, and just before I go home. If you need a response earlier than that, then pick up a phone, walk over to my desk, or speak to my manager and he'll filter out the bullshit.
Having a reputation for not responding to email, and not using email as a task list or document store prevents most people from using it for that purpose towards me.
I live at Inbox "I dont care" for the majority of the day. Don't really understand how people get so bogged down in it.
Please reread the following for those who aren't seeing it:
'You show yourself to be detail-oriented and precise. And, someone who’s vengeful and not afraid to hurt other people. All of those are excellent and useful additions to your reputation.'
Yes, it's really important you punch out other inmates on your first day of prison to set the tone. That's exactly how I want to live my life and the exact sort of people I want to hire.
What toxic rubbish.
This way you avoid much of the 'email ping pong' which is a real time-sink.
I read somewhere that you should delete e-mail from people that are e-mailing you for the first time and/or you feel it's not going anywhere. If they really want to contact you/need your help, they will send a second e-mail. And that e-mail is worth a reply.
From what I gather (not knowing anything official about Priority inbox), it seems to take into account how long you spend looking at an email (either thread or from an author). Email threads that I zip through never get tagged as important, whereas some threads that I've spend time looking at it will tell me that it's important from then on (and pick out other emails that are somewhat similar in content)
It also responds fairly quickly to changing preferences. I've had threads, regular email updates that have been tagged as important (either by me or by silicon) and I've had a change of heart and untagged it, and it won't mark it as important, and I'll notice a dropoff in similar topics being tagged as important.
It's nice, as I used to get a ding for every email I received, and I felt compelled to at least _look_ at it. I've since set it to ding only when something tagged as important pops in (only up to 5 times a day) and I'll only check all my other mail maybe once a day. If that.
More pragmatically, its a lot easier to know from a glance what happens when your inbox grows from 0 to 30 rather than 65,580 to 65,610.
In all honesty, though, its mainly the irrational stress -- but irrational stress is still stress.
What happens when a server starts acting up and you are flooded with 10 error emails per second. Will you go click through all of them even though they're essentially the same?
That can cost you an hour of your time, easily.
Ok you can write a filter and automatically mark them as read. Which still costs you at least 10 minutes of your time.
Or you could just ... not care. This costs you 0 minutes of your time. You merely mentally update the "zero" of your inbox.
Archiving's the perfect solution to my irrational stress, because nothing's deleted, but its out of my way.
For mail, I categorize things as "action", "waiting on", "follow up". Inbox means "uncategorized". Doing this means I can manage my email load without going insane.
I'm guessing you use some other system for to-dos?
Helped me hugely to recover control of my mail again.
> You wrote a cruddy message that seemed like Junk or Trash, and it was accidentally flagged. Your fault. Go away and write a better message.
This depends on who you usually work with. If you regularly do business with certain individuals or companies from certain countries, some of the most important emails will always go into your Spam folder, no matter how hard you try to train your filters. No, this has nothing to do with how cruddy the contents of the email is. Yes, this happens even with Gmail, and it's not even Gmail's fault.
This system works well if you're on the top of the pyramid.