Forgive the bad psychobabble joke, what I'm talking about is an E-mail that simultaneously informs you of 15 conferences, any of which may or may not be relevant. I get these at University but I assume that people elsewhere get something similar; a giant E-mail with many parts, only some of which is relevant. The initial problem is that it's "stuff" that defies the 2 minute rule--each item might take 2 minutes just to consider.

But it's not so important how long the processing takes, it's more a question of how to track it afterwards. Do you print off a copy and put it in several places in a tickler with different parts circled? Save it into different files in a digital tickler? Relevant information straight into a calendar?

I'm interested because sometimes the conferences are not for months to come, and I may or may not be interested, but want to think about it again later. The problem is, saving a massive E-mail like this isn't very conducive to that, because when I see it again, some of the dates will have past--and as Allen predicts, my mind goes numb to these E-mails, which especially after a week or two, mix actionables and non-actionables.