Comments on: Help! Email is broken for me

By: stef

stef — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:14:39 +0000

@Philthers yeah yeah yeah…

By: Stef Lewandowski » Declaring Inbox Victory!

Stef Lewandowski » Declaring Inbox Victory! — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:06:25 +0000

[...] comments Philthers on Help! Email is broken for meStef on Help! Email is broken for meJohn Henry on Help! Email is broken for meJake Grimley on Help! [...]

By: Philthers

Philthers — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:23:07 +0000

Have you tried having a shower first thing in the morning? Surely you don’t have to have a bath at 5:30 EVERY day.

By: Stef

Stef — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:12:12 +0000

Thanks for the support everyone! Less than two days and counting…

By: John Henry

John Henry — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:30:07 +0000

In our case we could maybe plan a bi-annual working lunch?

Rarely are our emails mission critical - in fact, letting the issues build up would be a positive thing, meaning interconnected elements could be discussed in a clump..

Good luck with your brave mission this Thursday!

By: Jake Grimley

Jake Grimley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:28:08 +0000

I can’t pretend I don’t spend hours each day responding to email. But the only strategy I’ve found for keeping on top of it is this:

* Ruthlessly ignore anything that doesn’t positively demand a response. Stick it in a ‘file’ folder immediately

* If possible, _Do not_ respond to any email the same day unless it is _genuinely_ urgent. Immediate replies tend to protract email dialogue and give a sense of being conversationally available. People then start to resent it if you don’t _always_ reply immediately. Replying the following day is much like sending a ‘letter’, and encourages you to send a _considered_ response which tends to draw a line under issues rather than protracting them.

* But _always_ reply the following working day. This allows you to set aside dedicated ‘email’ time each day and start each day with a clean slate.

* Set up an email rule so that emails marked with the ‘urgent’ marker are automatically routed to your junk folder.

OK — I made the last one up.

At the risk of sounding like a cult member, this book helped me to get a grip of the situation:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tomorrow-Other-Secrets-Time-Management/dp/0340909129

Good luck!

By: Neil Cocker

Neil Cocker — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:22:47 +0000

I feel yuor pain Stef. I can’t claim that things are quite that bad for me yet, but recently having launched two new projects I’m feeling very stressed every time I open up my inbox. Good luck in getting it all under control again!

By: Jan Lewandowski

Jan Lewandowski — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:12:26 +0000

Good luck with this Stef. Now you see why one of my wishes on Isowish is `I wish my children were telepathic’!

By: Dubber

Dubber — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 07:13:37 +0000

This is an intervention. Stef will be zero-inboxing by the end of the week.

We’re going to pull out all the tricks, and the aim is that by Monday, there will not only be email sanity, but there’ll be no nagging concerns about where all the different projects are at, everything will be handled appropriately at the point of entry, and while emergencies and stress will hardly be a thing of the past, at least they will no longer be the status quo.

This is the Mt Everest of email overflow, but it can be fixed.

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:55:47 +0000

Not sure if this helps or even works but after doing my Contacting Pete page http://peteashton.com/contacting_pete/ I was informed that it was quite daunting, which as sort of the effect I was going for, making people think twice before emailing me. I’ve also noticed, I think, a decrease in frivolous emails since then. Or I could be wrong.

So maybe a Contacting Stef page that explains how you’re using email and an autoresponse to each email sent to you that links to it?