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of open loops and non-concluded threads
terrence p | Jun 18 2007
Dear 43 Folderers I am curious to hear how folks deal with open loops, in particular, the open loops that are made out of those many, many emails you send out into the ether with ne'r a response to be had. I'm not talking about those cheesy "hey how you doing messages" either. No, I mean those important messages you send to your boss, or colleagues, or underlings that you need a response from. Important things like: to Personnel, what about that salary increase I filed a request for three years ago? or to the Big Boss, about all these huge equipment donations we're receiving? Yeah, we completely ran out of space to store them about six months ago. Where do you want me to store the new 100,000 square feet worth of new donations you're expecting next week?" I realize my query is part technology and part personality/communication skills. As for the latter, let me just say that I'm organized. I've got everything out in front of me, my ubiquitous capture device handy, and my trusted system running. But I guess what I realize is that trusted system running in the background isn't doing a very good job keeping me aware of my many, many open loops. A project manager's nightmare for sure. So from a technological standpoint, how are folks keeping their open loop flags in the air? I work mainly out of Mail.app and the only way I've been able to deal with this is by tagging each outgoing message with "follow up" (by means of employing MailTags) and creating a smart folder to look for those messages in my Sent folder. During my weekly review I look over this folder and it is pure misery. At what point do you stop listening to folks say "I'm sorry. there's so much to do and I'm just way too too busy" and start hearing "You suck. You're emails are unimportant to me?" Thanks. Any input would help. - - Aw nuts. Now I'm wondering . . . is anyone going to respond to THIS message? 6 Comments
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 This is where a tickler...Submitted by Berko on June 18, 2007 - 1:11pm.
This is where a tickler file and/or waiting for list comes in super handy. If I send an email, and I know I need to hear back from the recipient within a week, I put it in my tickler file for five days from now so I have plenty of time to ping the person before the time is up. If you don't have an electronic way to track these things, the "Waiting For" list is precisely where you want to put them. Of course, this could grow quite long for some people. If it gets to be unwieldy, then an agenda list for people you deal with regularly might be in order. Your waiting for list should be reviewed in your weekly review, so it should never be more than a week that you go without at least being reminded that you have pending items out there. The last thing is this: If it hasn't blown up after a period of time, folks lose their sense of urgency about it. A consistent, moderate sense of urgency I find is helpful for getting folks to respond. Don't be Chicken Little or they'll be equally unlikely to act in a timely matter. HTH. » POSTED IN:
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