Last week Andrew and I did a little spare time site called I So Wish, which seems to have gone down well, and Andrew was so inspired he wrote an e-book about it. (More about that in a separate post)

One of the wishes struck a nerve with me this weekend:

What do you so wish?

So I’m guessing that’s directed at me, because I know for a fact that Andrew’s inbox is empty at the end of every day. So - first up, sorry to that person for my email responsiveness being not what is should or used to be.

A snapshot of my email situation

Like a lot of people, email is a big part of what I do every day. I have messages coming in and out throughout the day and night. I try to reply to things from the office, on my iPhone, whenever I can plug in the laptop when on the road, even when I’m sitting in a meeting.

The trouble is, I’m just getting too much of it. And that means I’m just not being able to respond to everything I receive. Not cool. It makes me feel bad every single day.

As at today, this a grab of my inbox:

My inbox currently has 28478 items in it.
I have 14514 unread items.
I have my inbox automatically strip out spam and non-spam but anonymously addressed (BCC, etc.) into an anonymous folder. That has 9323 items in it.
Then I have 227785 spam emails. Any emails incorrectly marked as spam are lost, there’s no chance I’d ever find them.

Using the “is this less than 1 minute?” rule to respond to emails, anything that requires a more considered response goes into my “Starred” folder, which currently has 1446 items in it. That’s including emails that I have already responded to but that have active threads.

The bottom line is that I stopped being effective on email probably some time in January, and since then it’s just been getting worse and worse.

I did some rough calculations. If I were to read every email that came my way, and reply to every one that needed replying to, especially the ones that need long considered responses, I’d need to spend at least four hours of every day on it.

That’s on top of the average 4 hours of meetings I have per day, plus the eight hours of coding that I am currently trying to do to get my Odadeo site out of private beta, and get home for bath time at 5.30.

My current day is: Get up when my daughter starts calling (7.30ish), check my mail on the iphone, tap away on the laptop whilst having breakfast, go down to the office and start work, have a few meetings, try to get back for bath time at 5.30, then do laptop-based stuff into the evening, usually until 11pm. The last three months I’ve been pretty much doing this solidly.

It just doesn’t work.

And I’m coming across as rude and unresponsive.

Which makes people angry with me.

Which makes me feel horrible.

I found this interactive diagram of the situation:

With thanks to Mikeindustries

So, try this: push the top slider to ‘fast’, the bottom slider to ‘overloaded’, then (in your head) add options for ‘doing bath time’, ‘out of the country a lot’, ‘in another very exciting but time-consuming meeting’ and ‘building odadeo.com’ and you can see what the problem is.

Help!

The outcome of this is I’ve been missing very important emails, missing opportunities and generally turning into an email fanatic to the point where I suddenly find myself driving along, stopping at a red light, pulling my iphone from my pocket and bashing out an email in the 60 seconds I have before it goes green. Then putting the thing away and driving off. Not cool.

Every holiday or day off that I’ve had recently has had some kind of horrible gut-wrenching email separation anxiety or problem hanging over it or just bringing it to an abortive early conclusion. On Emily’s Birthday, for instance, we had to turn around on the motorway and cancel where we were going so that I could respond to urgent emails about a problem with a web server for instance.

Today, I was going through some of my ‘to do emails’ and sent one to a friend of mine. His response was:

“Wow, you must have quite the backlog if you are responding to messages from May!”

The thing is I hadn’t noticed that it was from May. I was just sending him a response to his email. Not cool either.

Email is broken

I don’t seem to be able to reduce the amount of email I receive, and I’ve only managed to delegate some of it to my assistant Estelle.

It just seems that Email as a medium is broken. For me to actually read and respond to every email that I receive would actually mean that I would be spending all of my time on email and none of my time on doing the things that the emails are about. That’s silly. But if I don’t respond to the emails then I just end up with urgent things going awry. It’s catch 22.

Here’s a grab from the filtered, actual emails, not spam, I should read that have just arrived in my inbox whilst writing this for instance:

I spoke to a prominent family law practitioner contact a few months ago. Her take on it was similar, but she had an interesting response to it. “I don’t do email any more. I only send letters”. Sage advice, but nigh on impossible for someone who works with the web.

Could the Dubber Method be the solution?

So. Things have come to a head with a couple of people this week, so I’ve decided to tackle the issue head on.

On Thursday and Friday you will not be able to reach me. I will be spending two days working with the help of Andrew Dubber to reclaim my inbox.

Andrew famously has an entirely empty inbox.

Now there’s something to aspire to.

So - I’m sorry to anyone who’s fed up with me for being unresponsive. I’m going to sort it out, and I’ll try to publish anything useful that I find out along the way (as long as they’re not Andrew’s patented trade secrets).

Wish me luck…

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