Notes from the field: e-mail

Between 75 and 100 emails get through my various filters at work and home every day. This isn’t a huge e-mail load, but still represents a problem. If every email consumes only two minutes of my time (read, trash or respond, and file) I’ve burned between 2 and 3.5 hours each and every day doing nothing but mail. And this doesn’t count the emails that take thought and research to handle.

I don’t have 3 spare hours every day, so this is a problem. It’s not just a problem for me, either: lots of you have the same problem, and some really smart people out there have spent a lot of time talking about how they manage to stay productive in the face of this flood of communication (in general I’m partial to this one for all things productivity).

There are several things that I do to stay focused in the din. First, my e-mail client (I use Apple Mail) is set to get new mail once an hour. Second, I don’t spend my day waiting for, and dealing with, new e-mails as they come in. In fact my target is to deal with e-mail in two sprints each day: once after I arrive, and again just before I leave.

Third, I impose a little e-mail discipline. I try to empty my inbox during each sprint. Each e-mail is either filed, deleted, or—if it can be handled in two minutes or less—dealt with and then archived. Mails that need more than two minutes’ attention get filed into folders that I then review about once a day and deal with as time and deadlines permit.

The last thing I do is actually something I don’t do.

I am by nature a filer, and my file hierarchy is a thing of byzantine wonder. If I want to find a briefing I gave about a work project in 2005 then it’s probably in ~john/ work/ outreach materials/ briefings/ activites and results/ 2005/ some folder. That’s 6 levels deep in my hierarchy until I am even presented with the file that holds the information I want. All this clicking and thinking about where stuff is (or might be) takes time.
I used to file e-mails in this way too, but this was taking way too much time. Since I rarely need to see any one message again (rare as a percentage of all the messages I receive), this was time wasted.

For e-mail I now put everything in one folder named, in the tradition of Gmail, “All Mail”. Anything I need to retrieve later is probably near the top sorted by date, or I can use my Mail’s search feature to get at what I need. I’m at least a year into my hierarchy-free approach to e-mail, and I love it. I keep (almost) everything because it takes time to decide what to delete unless it’s just obvious spam. There are very rarely times that it takes a while to come up with the search I need to get my message, and this can be frustrating. But the time I get back from not having 100 folders and subfolders to select when filing messages more than makes up for this infrequent frustration.