Email productivity: inbox 38

productivity, email

Today I finally watched Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” talk , which several of my friends have been raving about. This presentation is part of the outstanding Google Tech Talks series, from July 2007.

The video had been hiding on my iPod for a while now: productivity gurus tend to kindle feelings of inferiority and guilt in me, so I hesitated. I’ve had periods in my life when my productivity was, well, not precisely high, and am right now hopelessly behind in much of my personal-life and online projects — heck, I can hardly call myself a blogger these days, and am far behind maintaining and adding material to the Eggcorn Database. I also think I’ve been castigating myself enough all on my own, without some supremely efficient super-human hitting where it hurts. Last, I know — and am somewhat proud of the fact — that I do get a whole lot of stuff done at work (which just may have something to do with getting not much done anywhere else), and didn’t want to be to be told that I’m going about it all wrong.

After watching the video, though, I’m left thinking I was being a bit silly.

Because, first of all, Merlin Mann manages to come across as someone who is not naturally gifted at getting organised. Second, he isn’t dogmatically advocating some heavy machinery of a procedure that needs to be followed to the letter to be effective at all. And last because, wonder of wonders, I seem to be doing some things right.

• I’m one of those people whose daily load can easily be in the hundreds of email.
• Merlin Mann isn’t advocating using your inbox as a to-do list. Yay! Quite a few of my colleagues from the business (as opposed to technical) side do this, and it just doesn’t work for me. I’m an archive-and-search/sort kind of person, and my to-do list needs managing outside the email client.
• Likewise, “inbox zero” doesn’t mean to be maintaining a complex filing system for “done” email. One of my extremely effective colleagues does just that, but the mere decision-making overhead from sorting hundreds of pieces of mail into dozens of folders and subfolders makes me dizzy just by thinking of it (”Should that one go in ‘issues - reporting’ or ‘Engineering’ or ‘Germany’”?). But Merlin Mann, too, maintains one single archive folder, and so do I. (This is after mailing lists and several kinds of automatic notifications have been automatically filtered into folders and are getting automatically archived in this folder structure.)
• There were a few points I already implement, like replying with a short message right away, if possible. For me that’s a matter of keeping any given issue in memory for the shortest possible lapse of time, and freeing my scarce mental resources as soon as possible.
• Last, I really liked the idea to consider the email flow like tubes — there are incoming information and requests, and outgoing actions. This helped me understand why I really dislike it when some co-workers email me about something and then call 10 min later to talk about the same thing: At this point I likely have read the message and already decided when and how to follow up on it. They, however, force me to change my decision by making me revisit the topic at a moment not of my choice. It’s disruptive to my workflow, much more so than if they had just phoned without sending a message.

So what did I change after the talk? (It’s a day off for me, so I shouldn’t be doing anything. Strictly speaking.) There are two problem areas with my email handling:

• I’d been using my inbox as my (preliminary) archive, with every message being auto-archived to its final destination by the email client after two weeks. This means that the messages that require action were drowned out by those that don’t, or are already dealt with.
• Merlin Mann suggests a short list of possible actions to apply to every single piece of email (for example: delete - archive - answer - defer - delegate … but this is a personal matter). I was using generic flags, sometimes, but didn’t have any clear system how, whether, or when to apply them.

Getting a preliminary grip on these two points was so easy I’m still amazed: I went through the last few days’ email and flagged them in three different ways: “requires simple answer” (these I would usually answer right away, but remember, I wasn’t supposed to be working today; indeed this is a good test if my manager follows my blog — if yes, I’m in trouble), “requires translation into a to-do list task”, “requires more complex answer, probably involving other colleagues”. Then I created an “Archive” folder below the inbox, sorted by flag, and everything unflagged went in there, never to be looked at again. These messages are then going to be auto-archived as usual, but meanwhile, they’re out of sight. The entire thing took less than 10 min and brought me, if not to inbox zero, then at least to inbox 38 (down from about 1500). Not too shabby.

As for to-do lists, I’ve recently started trying out several applications and am using Todoist and Remember the milk for personal and work-related task management. Adding tasks whenever they occur to me is simplifying my life enormously, and it’s a good feeling to mark them as “complete”. I’ll hopefully revisit these two in a future post — I’m not fully decided on either yet.

Anyhow, for the talk, follow any of the links above, or watch right here:

chris @ November 27, 2007