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Email Overload - Not At My Desk All Day
illuscat | Mar 26 2007
My problem is with communication. I'm an academic teaching at two different schools and working another job directing an educational program. I have three different workplaces and no office (except at home). Between my different roles, I get a lot of email and a good deal of voicemail in a given week. During the workday, I'm often in the classroom, in transit, or in seclusion, trying to get papers graded (I teach writing). Because of this, I'm admittedly hard to reach. I feel terrible for making people wait for my responses, and I worry that it causes my professional reputation to suffer, but unless I ignore my other duties, I just can't devote an hour or more each day to getting that inbox to empty. This is complicated by the fact that many things in my inbox are requests I might have to say no to. How do I respond to the 12th student this week to ask for a last-minute letter of recommendation when deep down, I know I don't have the time to do it? The result is that my email has become an unhappy, guilt-ridden place to visit, reminding me of all the people who probably think I have some somehow failed them. Then, even when I do have time, I just don't want to go there... Any suggestions? 10 Comments
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 Email is one of the...Submitted by unstuffed on March 28, 2007 - 4:18am.
Email is one of the hardest things to manage, for a bunch of reasons. One of them is the expectation that we'll respond instantly. No-one, except maybe your close family, is entitled to have immediate access to you at any hour of the day or night. There are several folks who say that they deliberately keep their response time around one day, so that people will stop expecting immediate answers. And if you only check your email twice a day, you're saving yourself a whole bunch of time already. Second, you're falling into one of the big email traps, which is leaving stuff-to-do in your inbox. This just means that you're double- or triple- or quadruple-handling it, and it wastes your time. Do what you have to do to cut it down. If you use Mac Mail, there's a couple of groovy add-ons called Mail Tags and Mail Act-On. They let you tag any email either with tags, or as belonging to one of the Projects in iCal: you can then name a ToDo for it and give it a due date, and then archive it into a smart folder with a keystroke. Very very sweet indeed. Means that you only have to read the email once, decide what to do with it, then tag it and have it fly to the right place for you to reply or act on or whatever later. There's undoubtedly something similar for other mail clients. If you use unix, you can put a bunch of rules in your procmail file or whatever you use, to filter things into folders according to pre-defined conditions. Remember, though, that this means you have to specify the rules in advance, so you need to think carefully. One thing you'll have to bear in mind, though: you must clear your inbox regularly/frequently, and you must act on the things you've put aside to act on. Okay, two things. One of the big mistakes people make is putting things aside thinking "I'll deal with that later, when I have more time": that particular later, the one with all the extra time, doesn't happen. Your email isn't going to slow down. People won't stop sending you crap. So if you can't deal with it now, will you ever have time to deal with it? Moral of the story: use the grooviest mail add-ons to make life easier, process daily, and schedule time to deal with email. Oh, and learn to be ruthless. It'll save you time and anxiety. Rats. One more thing: check Merlin's archives, because he's got a few groovy articles about Inbox Zero and becoming an email ninja. Well worth a read. » POSTED IN:
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