Anyone who has lived with me or worked closely with me knows that I have a lot of trouble staying organized and a lot of trouble keeping on top of my email. Typically my inbox grows to a couple of thousand messages and then I “archive” it and start again. This happens every couple of years.
When I receive email I either discard it immediately, reply if it will only take a few moments, or if its important and will take some time to deal with I leave it there to be dealt with later. This almost never happens, my inbox grows, my family wonders why I never respond to my emails, my coworkers form the opinion that I’m unreliable, my wife sick of people emailing her when they want to get my attention.
Last week I came up with a great idea. I’m going to put my inbox on a diet. Every day my inbox must shrink by at least 25 items. I estimated that I should be able to get through the 700 or so emails in a month if I can keep up the pace.
Being a nerd, the first thing I did was make a spreadsheet. For each day it tracks my goal inbox size and how I’m doing. I have ups and downs but I’m making solid progress towards zero. There’s even a chart:
As I’m going I’m also building the habit of processing email as it arrives. I can’t afford not to. I know that I’ll fall off the wagon again and I’ll let my inbox get out of control, but I think I’ve got a strategy for recovering.
3 Comments
As your unpaid QA As your unpaid QA professional, although, you have described some worthwhile problems to solve, I think you have to be careful not to introduce other ones. I think you have to first (a) bound the amount of time you will spend keeping your inbox on its diet, and (b) structure the time spent on it, so you aren’t always interrupt driven throughout your day.
I think that’s a really good I think that’s a really good point, but I don’t think that I get too much email to have time to deal with it all, I think that I haven’t been devoting enough attention to dealing with it. Only enough attention to get stressed about it.
Merlin Mann has good advice about only checking email a couple of times a day. I need to do the same about LJ, blogs, twitter, etc. One problem is that we’re heavily patch-review oriented here and those notifications come through email. Ahh well, I’ll cross that bridge when it comes.
dealing with email My problem, is that by responding to email to delete it or file it, I then get responses to said emails and it can feel like a never ending game, which sucks.