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SUMMARY
The mathematics of distributive systems suggests meetings might be better. Gotta start with some philosophy and diagnosis of the problem before we dive into the solution. Good article, if technical at times.
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Anyone who works in a standard office environment has firsthand experience with the problems that followed the enthusiastic embrace of asynchronous communication. As the distributed-system theorists discovered, shifting away from synchronous interaction makes coördination more complex. The dream of replacing the quick phone call with an even quicker e-mail message didn’t come to fruition; instead, what once could have been resolved in a few minutes on the phone now takes a dozen back-and-forth messages to sort out. With larger groups of people, this increased complexity becomes even more notable. Is an unresponsive colleague just delayed, or is she completely checked out? When has consensus been reached in a group e-mail exchange? Are you, the e-mail recipient, required to respond, or can you stay silent without holding up the decision-making process? Was your point properly understood, or do you now need to clarify with a follow-up message? Office workers pondering these puzzles—the real-life analogues of the theory of distributed systems—now dedicate an increasing amount of time to managing a growing number of never-ending interactions.
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SUMMARY
Fantastic, step-by-step advice for redesigning the whole way you do email to make you WAY more efficient. Khe Hy says Tiago Forte is this generation's David Allen for good reason. This advice is logical, clear, and it works. If you are drowning in email, skip the rest of this email, read this link and implement it.
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The main problem with how people use email is that they use it for everything.
You wouldn’t buy a multifunction toaster-power drill-toilet bowl cleaner, would you? You wouldn’t find a combination leaf blower-immersion blender particularly useful, right?
And yet for a tool central to our working lives, that represents a far worse compromise of incompatible functions, we somehow put up with a Frankenstein-like monstrosity of a communication tool/to do list/project manager/notification system/composition tool/reading list/file storage area/reference library/conversation archive/planning tool/note-taking app.
We hired email for one simple job, and now it’s the codependent handyman living in our basement, banging away at odd jobs late into the night.
Let’s turn back the tide and strip email down to its original function, the only one that it does better than any other tool: collecting new inputs.
That’s it.
Every other function is much more effectively handled by one of four purpose-built productivity apps, in the same way that our fictional friend could have benefited from a to do list, an agenda, a filing cabinet, a magazine rack, and a trash can.
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SUMMARY
A simpler, shorter summary of similar advice on how to manage your email, with a few unique suggestions.
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I’m a big believer that high quality tools more than pay for themselves in higher productivity. There are limits to that logic, of course, but if you can make your own tool decisions, ask yourself if having a good setup can increase your productivity by 1, 2, 3%. You can do the math on that.
Use an email service with great search. You need to be able to find archived messages with ease. Nobody beats Google on this front. Both my company and personal addresses are on Gmail. I have both accounts set up in Apple Mail on my Mac, iPhone and iPad because those apps work really well when offline. But if a quick search isn’t turning up the message I need, I hop into Gmail and there it is.
Kill all those folders. I know people who make long lists of folders for every project or topic. Guess what? It takes a lot of time to archive emails that way. I have two folders (more detail below) and I still misfile things by accident once in a while. If you use an email service with great search, you do not need 85 folders in your mailbox. Put everything in one big archive, and use search to find it when you need it.
Get a to-do app. Too many people use email as a to-do list, and trust me, your inbox is awful at that. What is important gets mixed in with what is new. You constantly have to re-read the email and reinterpret what you actually need to do.
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SUMMARY
This is another must-read if you use Gmail. And if you don't use Gmail, you definitely should. Processing your inbox without touching your mouse or trackpad definitely saves you time. And it makes you feel nerdy cool.
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One year ago, I invested about two minutes into learning shortcuts for Gmail.
Since then, it's saved me about one second per email action (ex. deleting, reply, composing, etc), which equals roughly 15 minutes per day.
That means over the past year, I've spent 60 fewer hours in Gmail.
Here's the problem: there are a LOT of keyboard shortcuts for Gmail, and not all of them are actually useful.
Understanding this, I've compiled the most useful keyboard shortcuts for Gmail. It's organized by the three views (Inbox View, Conversation View, and Compose View) we experience in Gmail.
Here's the best part: these shortcuts can be learned in less than two minutes. The first step is to turn on Gmail keyboard shortcuts.
Here are the shortcuts.
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SUMMARY
"We caught up with some professionals who admit to receiving 100+ emails per day in order to find out how they manage their time and their sanity when it comes to this communication channel. Here are some of the rules they swear by (and think you should too…)"
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If you get an email, even if it arrives in the middle of the night and you might not have the answer to a customer’s / colleague’s concern or question right away, answer it! Let them know that ‘I see you, I hear you and I will get back to you with what you need!’
At the end of the day, if your customers have 10 different providers of software of all sorts, you want your customers to consider you the most present and accessible. To position yourself in this way, answer right away with short acknowledgment replies then follow up with the bulk of the message. Speed is the key to success!
- Niclas Ramon Staberg, Customer Success Manager at Freespee
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I'm going to spend this postscript explaining my answer to a specific niche topic on email management: How do I get to Inbox Zero* when I have thousands of emails in my inbox today? Read the articles above for other topics.
* "inbox zero" is a rigorous approach to keeping your email inbox empty or near empty at all times.
If you have thousands of emails today, the idea of getting down to zero feels overwhelming. Today I woke up with 1600 emails in my inbox. If I spent only one minute on each email, it would still take me 26 and a half hours to clean up my emails. It feels overwhelming. But I got through it. And it only took me about four hours. That's still a lot of time, but it's a manageable amount of time. So don't give up hope. And if you have 20,000 emails? I don't think it would actually take that much longer.
If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, you might want to declare email bankruptcy. When you declare financial bankruptcy, you unburden yourself from having to meet all your debt payments. When you declare email bankruptcy you unburden yourself form having to read and reply to all the emails in your inbox. You simply select all your emails and archive them.
My friend Tom from Bridgewater used to do this. When he'd go on vacation, he'd have several hundred emails stacked up in his inbox when he returned. Instead of trying to answer them (and ruin his first week back) he would delete them all. When I heard this, my jaw dropped. But what if you miss something important? If it is really important, he'd reply, I'll find out somehow - they'll email me again. Now that's a little too cavalier for my taste, but it does have a gutsy logic to it.
When you declare email bankruptcy, you can archive all your emails then go to your archives and select the last fifty to return to your inbox to be read and replied to. That way you are dealing with the relevant threads and you can always go back to the archived messages if you need to.
My approach is a little different. I'll tell you what it is.
First, block out a solid chunk of time. You need three to five hours largely uninterrupted. It's like cleaning out a room in your house. I can't just organize one section of my closet. I need to organize the whole thing or nothing and that takes time.
Second, learn and practice those Gmail shortcuts. They will save you a lot of time in this process as you handle repeated actions in a batch process.
Third, You need to follow the Ds rule. For every email in your inbox you should either delete it, do it, delegate it, defer it or defer it.
- Delete it: This is my favorite one because it is easy. The only thing I'd say when deleting is to think about whether you should unsubscribe before you delete. Many of the kinds of emails that you can just delete aren't worth reading in the first place. They are marketing emails and they are a waste of time. You need to be ruthless about deleting though. The less you delete, the more you will do or defer and both those things takes more time. And you don't have to read every email to delete it. You can tell if you need to read it 90% of the time by just looking at who it is from and what the subject is.
- Do it: if it takes 2 minutes or less to respond to, respond to the email immediately. Don't file it or let it sit there.
- Delegate it: if you aren't the right person to handle it, delegate it by forwarding it to the right person.
- Defer it: if it takes longer than 2 minutes to handle, because it requires research or multiple steps or because it requires a long and thoughtful reply, don't get sidetracked into doing it while your main goal is trying to get to inbox zero. You'll get sidetracked. Defer it by putting that task on a list and come back to it later when your main goal isn't email management but is getting that task done.
Fourth, go from top to bottom, newest to oldest. This tip is controversial. Some productivity gurus insist you should do the oldest emails first. I like doing the new ones first for a couple reasons:
1) When you are dealing with live threads, you feel good because you are making progress on things that are relevant and important now, not things from several months ago.
2) Live threads often require more thought. So it's easier to do those at the start of your process, before you get tired from spending hours doing this. The older emails can mostly be deleted or archived, so that's easy to handle when you are mentally tired from the early part of the process.
They say do the hard things first and it'll all be downhill from there. Same philosophy applies here.
Fifth, Do this on a computer with a proper keyboard. You can't do this well on a phone.
Sixth, Take a break every thirty minutes or so. You will burnout if you try to do it without stopping. Celebrate after every hundred emails. You are making progress!
Seventh, don't try to put everything in folders or tags. If you have good email search like Gmail, you will be able to find whatever you need and you will save time by simply archiving rather than trying to file everything in discrete places.
Eighth, plan ahead because you will have to do a mini-version of this the next day. If you are replying to hundreds of emails in a day, like I did today, you are probably going to get dozens, if not hundreds of replies the next day. Boom your email box is huge again. No problem, just set aside time for round two the next day and be just as disciplined about hitting those.
If you received random emails from me today with months-long delays in response, it is because I followed this method to get through everything. I have two other inboxes I still need to attack, but it felt amazing to get at least the first two under control today. Thanks for your patience.
Good luck with your system and your execution. Hope this was helpful.
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
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