
Managing Email Realistically - admp
http://mattgemmell.com/2012/08/05/managing-email-realistically/
======
snprbob86
Having recently re-joined the big-co world, allow me to share my email
management strategy that has been working splendidly for me over the past
month and a half. Note that while these instructions are MS Exchange (
_cringe_ ) centric, the general idea applies universally.

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."

~~~
codemac
While this is a great list (the Not Inbox trick is a very successful filter
for many people), the comment about ignoring calendar meetings until the day
of is a bit jarring.

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.

~~~
snprbob86
> I respect not only my own time, but others as well.

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.

------
dools
_does it keep me permanently at Inbox Five Or Fewer, and make my email client
a happy place to be? Of course it doesn’t_

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.

~~~
aGHz
You might fall in the category Matt explicitly excluded from his audience. His
advice is specifically for people that are either unwilling or too lazy to
deal with 40 minutes of emailing per day.

------
Jarshwah
This sounds nearly the same as how I manage my Inbox. People at work know that
I "dont give a shit" about email, and won't send me random nuff nuff stuff.

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.

------
neverm0re
Entire sections of this read like a sociopath trying to give us tips on email.
I particularly enjoyed reading his thoughts on how it is better to seek
trivial minutiae in emails to volley them on back to someone actually looking
to get work done.

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.

------
ivancdg
I would add that often it is effective to write a reply immediately (ie get it
out of your headspace)...but save it in your drafts folder, and send it only
the next morning.

This way you avoid much of the 'email ping pong' which is a real time-sink.

~~~
greenyoda
It's even more efficient to wait until the next day to write the reply, since
you might not need to reply at all. A large percentage of the people who ask
me questions at work manage to figure out the answer for themselves if I don't
reply for a couple of hours (and they might even learn something by finding
the answer on their own).

------
hackerpolicy
I can see the system working the author, but not for everyone. Actually, the
"Reply within 24h" for clients is terrible advice, in my experience: if you
take long enough to reply, they will call you, and this call might last
forever. It takes only a few seconds (with GMail/GApps shortcuts) to reply
"Ok, investigating the issue."

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.

------
natrius
Use GMail's priority inbox. Train it according to your personal subjective
notion of importance. It will eventually become as good at separating the
wheat from the chaff as it is at separating spam from your real email.

~~~
gcr
"Eventually"? How well does the priority inbox work for people in the real
world? (I'm a curious non-gmail user)

~~~
atrus
It's fairly responsive to your needs. It will pick up on an email threads
importance (as in a mailing list) fairly quickly.

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.

------
thrownaway2424
Can't understand the inbox zero (or in this case, inbox ten) crowd. What's so
hard about letting the useless sludge fall off the bottom of your screen,
neither read nor deleted? My "Inbox" at work has 65,580 unread items at this
moment. This does not cause me any kind of stress or burden.

~~~
jmduke
It definitely stresses me the hell out.

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.

~~~
Swizec
Why is that different?

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.

~~~
jmduke
Ctrl+A + E. (Or select all & auto-archive.)

Archiving's the perfect solution to my irrational stress, because nothing's
deleted, but its out of my way.

------
wamatt
I recently installed SaneBox on my Gmail account.

<http://www.sanebox.com>

Helped me hugely to recover control of my mail again.

------
kijin
> _Don’t check your Junk or Trash folders, ever._

> _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.

~~~
vm
The most senior execs I know tend to send the most poorly worded, cursory
emails. Can't let those slip in the junk folder!

This system works well if you're on the top of the pyramid.

