Email Triage
I’ve always been a tidy-inbox type, but I was starting to fall well behind at the end of last year. I spent November working long hours before a trip to Paris. “I’ll get caught up on email over the holidays,” I thought in early December, when I returned from Paris with things a bit out of control.
Then we had a 6-day power outage, relatives here over the holidays (fun, but not much email time), and suddenly mid-January was upon us, email still a mess, and then … Wikigate. A new level of email madness, following by an extremely busy trip to India, a short stay at home (including an internal conference at which I spoke and other distractions), then a trip to Australia.
During Wikigate, I just gave up on getting anything other than the top X handled each day. When you get X emails a day, handling the top X is called “being responsive.” But on a day when you get 100X emails, handling the top X leaves a lot of people feeling ignored. And once you get used to ignoring lots of people, that can snowball
Anyway, as of this morning at 10:00 my email in-box had 1588 items. These were all non-spam: messages addressed to me or messages I had copied from a DL’s folder to my in-box because I felt I should act on them.
I spent all afternoon and evening taking a pass through every message in the in-box, responding to those that just needed a quick response, deleting some outright, filing archival ones into folders, and so on. Most of the responses I sent out started with things like “My apologies for the long delay in responding, but I’ve been traveling more than usual and have fallen far behind on email.”
I now have 349 emails in my in-box, all ones that require more than a few seconds to handle. Tomorrow’s another exciting day.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 11:26 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on March 5, 2007 at 6:48 am Tom wrote:
Wow, is this what happens to “don’t sit at the computer all day” Sunday?
You’d better take Megan to Paris or something to make up for all that computer sittin’!
on March 5, 2007 at 9:55 am Doug wrote:
Yeah, Sunday didn’t go as planned.
Monday’s not looking good, either.
on March 5, 2007 at 3:19 pm Scott B wrote:
On the bright side, monday is almost over!
on March 6, 2007 at 4:14 pm Tom wrote:
Funny you mention all of this — I’m trying to rearrange how I deal with incoming e-mail. I have historically tried to be a “respond when it comes” kind of guy to a large degree (I’m imperfect at best, but I try). This has created a very difficult to maintain set of expectations for my clients. So now I’m going to try to set aside a half-hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon JUST for response to e-mail. We’ll see how long it lasts, but I’m kind of looking forward to just turning down the sound so the little chime doesn’t bug me and cranking out some work.
‘Course, I’m in a different position than you. I really am as connected to or as isolated from my clients as I make myself. So I can experiment with stuff like this — I doubt a more corporate environment allows such arbitrary rules.
on March 7, 2007 at 6:45 pm Doug wrote:
Yeah, it’s hard to hide around here. Although I have a few techniques, which I’m not at liberty to say in public.
One thing that really makes email more complicated is working with all these people from all around the world. I now have regular daily contact with people in a wide variety of time zones, so I can’t just leave work in the evening and think “tomorrow’s another day.” If I need an answer from somebody in Asia on something, for example, I need to remember to send the question by the end of my day (the start of their day) or else when I get in the next morning it’s night there and I can’t get an answer until the end of that day.
The only reasonable solution is to fidget with email constantly, 24 hours a day, and never get anything else done. Thank God I’ve figured out the secret.