Email. One of the world’s great inventions. You can dash off a quick note to someone and when they’ve got a few minutes to reply, they send a quick note back. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what email system you’re using, if you’ve got spare change for a phone call. All you need is an internet connection.
My first job after college was pre-web. Sure, email existed, but it wasn’t exactly mainstream. I wrote a lot of memos at work. I would type them up, print them out, make copies, initial the From: line, and bring them to the mailroom so they could be distributed to everyone’s inboxes. You know, the physical ones on top of people’s desks. Sometimes, I had a wide cc list that included people from multiple locations. In that case, I would print my memo, walk it down to the copy center in the basement, give it to the Xerox guy we had working there full-time, wait for him to make the hundred copies, and then bring it to the mailroom. And I’d have to do things like use a yellow highlighter to mark who each copy was for on the 100 line cc list. Or stuff the copies into those interoffice envelopes for hours.
Sometimes, I wish those days were back.
My email situation has gotten so bad that when I read about email bankruptcy on valleywag, I thought I may have found the answer to my unsolvable problem. I looked at my mountain of mail and thought, what can I do other than start over? The alternatives suggested by Valleywag (that they cautioned would be too extreme for most people) didn’t seem extreme enough to help. Nor did the other solutions I read.
I had too much mail and not enough time, but I knew I had too many important messages to just dump everything. So what to do? I asked around. What do other people do? Some people said they used their inbox like a to do list. Sounds great, but my inbox had 15,000 messages in it — some read, some unread, some that I needed to deal with, some I just needed to delete. It had become impossible to even find the to dos.
What didn’t work:
- Keeping everything in my inbox with no deleting or categorizing. I use gmail and I have filters set up that label things in mailing lists and keep them from the inbox and have a filter that labels everything addressed specifically to me, but that just wasn’t enough. My inbox was still overflowing and I had no ability to keep up with it. It was like trying to sort the ocean into three pails, each the size of a thimble, and wondering what to do with the extra water.
- Over categorizing. Once I realized the lack of categorization wasn’t working, I set up the most granular organization system imaginable. For instance, I had Sitemaps – to do, Sitemaps – mobile, Sitemaps – blog, Sitemaps.org… you get the idea. It was just too much. I even tried setting up “to do” and “done” labels for each category. That also didn’t work. That was just hiding everything I had to do so that in addition to getting the work done, I had to work at finding it in the first place.
Clearly, I had to do something. Deleting it all and starting over with a new system was tempting, but so many people were expecting me to get back to them. I imagined a rising email army, swords raised, and the mob saying to me in perfect harmony, you killed my important email, prepare to die!
Last week, I set aside an entire day to figure it out. I went through everything in my inbox, one by one. Delete, file, need to address. I went through an entire month. And then I asked (as you do, on twitter), how far back should I go? The overwhelming twitter response was a month. If someone needs something from you and they sent you mail over a month ago, they’ll send you new mail. Or more likely, they’ll fashion a voodoo doll in your likeness, stick pins in it and throw it into a fire of burning coals and lava, but sending another email is one possibility.
So I took the plunge and moved everything from before April 1st out of my inbox and into a folder. I figured if I managed to get through the “need to address” items from April, I could start working on March. And then (after an entire day of sorting) my inbox was empty. Instantly, new mail started coming in, but with a clean inbox, it was easy to sort the new stuff.
I started tackling the highest priority mail. I am still, as it happens, tackling that high priority mail. What I really needed was a full “address email day” to follow my “email triage day”, but I had to do laundry and pack and fly to Philadelphia and speak at WebSearch University and do a few other things like that, so sadly, that full email day has not yet materialized.
I have already gotten several emails that were pings on things from pre-April and I’ve addressed those right away (guilt, you see, over sending the email to the land of email limbo in the first place), so perhaps it’s true that anything you need to address that’s older than a month will come and find you.
I discovered that I needed a new folder called “waiting”. Lots of times, once I address something, I can’t just move it to a done folder or delete it, because I’m waiting to get more information back before I can close it out. But I don’t want to keep it in my “need to address” folder, because then that’s more difficult to use as a to do list. By having a waiting folder, I can clear it from the list, but still have it handy to follow up on later. Or so the theory goes. I have barely made a dent in the to do list, much less made it to the follow up pile.
So, if you sent me mail in April, I am working on it. If you sent me mail before April, please send it again. Or at least make my voodoo doll look pretty before you throw it onto the coals.
How do you stay on top of your email? Any tips on avoiding email bankruptcy?
Tags: email
May 1st, 2007 at 6:28 pm
The biggest thing for me is answering email ASAP – if I’m gone for a few days things get overwhelming. Also, if it falls off the first page of my inbox (most recent 100 unarchived messages) I may not see it EVER again).
I found this post helpful in streamlining things.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/three-solid-gmail-productivity-tips/