
Email isn’t the problem - ColinWright
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/08/14/email-isnt-the-problem/
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joshklein
I believe the title is right, but then the article goes in the wrong
direction. "Email isn't the problem" was the first thing that popped into my
head while sitting in the audience for the pg keynote at Pycon.

It's a beautiful thing that the protocol says you have an address that anyone
can know, that will always receive things meant for you, that will never
refuse to accept a message. That's how physical addresses work, too. What if
you couldn't actually reach a person without an introduction? What if you
needed to pass the gatekeepers to get something to them? How different would
our world be? It's hard to even grok what decades of a different protocol
would have turned the Internet into.

But this is besides the point. Email isn't the problem, _you are_. Your mental
model is wrong. Email is not a to do list unless you make it one. Email is an
inbox, just like the phone and the snail mail and the comments of a stranger
on the street. It's an inbox the same way suggestions from your mother are;
you are allowed to ignore them! Sure, there may be repercussions, but there
are repercussions to letting anyone tell you what to do, too. It is _your_ job
to triage and sort the things in your inboxes, no matter where they are, into
your actual list of things to do.

If you read your email and say, "I'll come back and do this later," you're
doing email wrong. You have to either answer the email, delete the email, or
triage it in some way to your real to do list, one you actually work off of.

I use Evernote with a fairly complicated GTD-inspired system on top of it to
manage this, but the tools are besides the point - I can work without them,
too. The main challenge is divorcing yourself from the silly belief that you
have to do what people tell you.

~~~
bunderbunder
_Email isn't the problem, you are. Your mental model is wrong. Email is not a
to do list unless you make it one._

Amen!

I have a colleague who complains that she gets about 100 emails a day, all
from people asking her to do things.

She happens to be the only person in the entire company who has this problem.
She also happens to be the only person in the entire company who treats every
single email as if it's urgent and needs an immediate response, and who
responds to every request by doing everything in her power to do whatever it
is the person asked about for them, rather than (where appropriate) just
offering some basic advice to get them pointed in the right direction.

Meaning she's the only person in the entire company who has actively
cultivated a situation where she's the first one anyone thinks to ask for
help, and they ask her for help without bothering to try too hard to solve the
problem on their own.

