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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The secret of addressing email volume problems is to ignore it. I received 15,000 and sent 9,500 emails in 2009, when I declared no more. Now, I get about 7,000 and send about 1,000. I read <40% and keep <3% more than 90 days. Nothing lives in my mailbox more than 48 hours.

The funny thing is, people now apologize all of the time for bothering me. You need to train most folks to respect your time. The ones I need to hear from are on my iOS VIP list (~a dozen people, give or take, about a third VIP, a third team members, a third external peeps) and I respond immediately if necessary.

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Do you just leave it all in the inbox and respond to what's near the top, or do you archive it?

I typically zip through a few times a day and delete/act/save quickly. I try to err towards delete. I started with a GTD process and tweaked it to work for me. I have a script move everything older than 48 hours old into another folder, and the server-wide policy purges it in 90 days unless I slap another retention policy on it.

In the past, a lot of my email was "transactional" stuff that required constant attention. I felt guilty for not checking it every few minutes, and doing so was really stressful as a huge chunk of most days is in meetings or calls due to the nature of what I do. (This also make me a hard person to reach, as I don't work more than 50 hours a week unless there is a crisis)

Now that stuff is pushed to more appropriate venues, like our daily standup meeting.

>In the past, a lot of my email was "transactional" stuff that required constant attention. I felt guilty for not checking it every few minutes, and doing so was really stressful as a huge chunk of most days is in meetings or calls due to the nature of what I do. (This also make me a hard person to reach, as I don't work more than 50 hours a week unless there is a crisis)

I think this may be my actual problem. I started a website that now has customer support that goes to my inbox. I'm looking into delegating it.

They're not emails I can ignore, and they take time. Apart from that, email volume isn't too bad.

Act, delegate, file or delete - that's all there's to it. Most of the time I just use my Delete button.

this is called setting up filters, there's no trick to it, it's pretty simple to set up filter and ignore people you don't want to respond to. 7000 is 22 a day, assuming a 6 day work week, that's pretty low volume to handle, I would venture to say that you could probably manage to read more than 9 emails a day (40% of 22)

People feeling like they have to apologize sounds like you've made people feel guilty for emailing you. I can't help but find the whole comment a little self important and pretentious. You have time to fritter on hn, yet manage to only read 9 emails a day and reply to 3 a day, that's pretty lame. If you worked at my company and managed that, I'd have to let you go.

Why would you assume a six day work week? That's a scary attitude..

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