Category: Email

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An Article on E-mail Etiquette

A humorous article from the New York Times of June 26th caught my eye for some interesting points that it made about handling emails.

While the main point of the article was to deliver some email advice to someone who is entering public life, I think that some of the advice was mistaken.

While I agree with some of the advice (especially when it comes to dealing with “wackos” who send email) I think the advice about handling email was built on a faulty premise.

The author makes the point that he does not keep an empty inbox, but instead treats his inbox as a rolling todo list.  He tried David Allen’s advice to return the inbox tozero (i.e. to empty it) at least once per week, but found that it didn’t work for him.  His reasoning was that merely moving the email to a folder didn’t make sense, as he was merely moving messages around from one folder to another, accomplishing little.

He missed the point that I believe Allen is trying to make, and in doing so sets himself for future failure.

The habit he has adopted involves him taking the following steps:

1) reading his email

2) making a mental decision to do something with it later .e.g  study it, share it, store it, act on it, etc.)

3) leaving it where he found it (in the inbox)

This might not be a problem for him today, when the number of incoming emails numbers around 150 after a typical spam removal operation.  However, if his email were to double or triple in number, his system would encounter difficulties as his inbox would become overwhelming.

What  he missed in Allen’s advice was something that many miss, which is the principle or practice underlying the tip thatAllen is giving.

The obscure principle in operation here is that an inbox is a temporary collector of incoming items that will be subject to later processing and immediate removal.  When too many items are are acted on with steps 1,2 and 3 above, the result is that items in the inbox become lost in a mountain of past and present messages.  This eventually ruins the peace of mind of the user,as the number of decisions that need to be made mushrooms and preys on the mind.  While we all have our breaking points, we all crumble when too many time demands are waiting to be processedby our already overloaded mental circuits.

Also, the more email the inbox contains, the more likely it is that information will be lost.  This is true for all of us.

He is wrong that merely moving an email to a different folder does nothing — the action by itself frees up the inbox to receive new, clearly viewable inputs.  It might not affect his productivity at the moment, simply because the number of time demands entering his life through his inbox is relatively low.

He mentions that he reads email all throughout theday, spending  perhaps an hour or so on the task in total. It’s even easie to see here that his current practice won’t scale well — if he were to be promoted and needed to manage a sudden increase in time demands, he could easily spend a half a day going through steps 1-3 for each email he wants to keep in his inbox.

Click here to read the article at the New York Times website.

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Tech Firms Combine to Combat Email Overwhelm

istock_000003289601xsmall.jpgA most remarkable article in the June 14th New York Times entitled “Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast” starts with the following quote:

The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

The problem of email overload is described in detail, and cites a recent study that found that a typical information worker consults their email more than 50 times per day, and instant messaging some 77 times per day.

Also coming out of recent research is the finding that interruptions in an information worker’s day are costing U.S. corporations alone some $650 billion per year.  (The initial quote in the Times was corrected to change the word “millions” to “billions.”)

Companies are trying different strategies to limit the interruption.  Intel workers are trying to check email less frequently. A Google software engineer introduced a program called “E-Mail Addict, which blocks the user from accessing email for 15 minutes.

So far, so good.  These findings seem to corroborate most email users’ personal experience.  This is a real problem indeed.  New terms are being coined to address the issue like “email bankruptcy” and “email apnea” (what happens when a user unconsciously holds their breath when they see how many new items they have in ther inboxes.)

But is the problem one of email volume, poor email etiquette, badly designed software, or something else?

The answer seems to lie in an experiment that some Intel engineers began to announce “quiet time” to their colleagues.  In this way they limited their interruptions from other people, and also turned off access to their email.   In a survey following the experiment, three-quarters thought that the practice should be extended to the rest of the company.

I think that the idea that the problem lies in the software, or in etiquette is wrong.

Instead, I believe it resides in the poor time management habits of users.

The reasoning is simple.  An incoming email that is not immediately deleted is being kept by the user for a reason– they have made a very quick mental decision to perform an action on that message at some later time.

There is nothing wrong with that, except when it’s accompanied by the habit of leaving the email in the inbox.

That’s a little like putting something in your  mouth, liking the taste, and deciding to save some for later in one’s mouth.  It’s a gross concept, but an inbox is like a mouth — a place for temporary staging.  While food is staged in the mouth, normally a decision is made that is followed by an action.

Storage of food in the oral cavity is  generally detrimental to the welfare of the mouth (chewing tobacco and gum are notable exceptions to the rule.)

In the same way, storage of email in the inbox is a habit that leads to overwhelm.  A different habit of immediate removal is the initial practice that some are using to effectively deal with even hundreds of incoming email each day.

Also, working in an environment that is open to distractions from incoming email or other people or a cell phone or anything else is also a habit that contributes to overwhelm.

The point here is that email overwhelm is the result of using habits that were just not geared for the digital age.  Most working adults developed their productivity habits when paper was the norm, and the volume of incoming information and time demands was limited.  They in turn taught their techniques to the next generation, who were never taught new methods in school, or in the workplace.

The resulting overwhelm is only to be expected, as the sheer volume of time demands entering the mind-space of today’s knowledge worker through different channels has simply exploded.  Also exacerbating the problem is that fact that there is no proper research being done today in the area of time management. The result is that there is no agreement on the common set of practices that professionals should adopt.

Working professionals don’t need better software, although that would help a little.  Without a digitally-driven set of new habits, re-engineered software and classes etiquette will only contribute to the overwhelm.

 The original New York Times article can be found here.

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Cutting the Volume of Email

I picked up the following quote from a post in Tim Ferris’ blog:

Jim — May 29, ’08 – 10:17 PM

“Another effect of reading and replying to e-mail frequently is that you don’t allow others responses to build up. Which means you may cover the same ground they do (costing you time you didn’t need to spend), or jumping into a thread early may prolong it (and sometimes lead to flamewars), again costing you time that either/both waiting to reply or waiting to read at all can reduce.

(Of course, replying sooner when you have the actual info can save time for everyone. It’s the jumping in with opinion rather than fact that is more likely to expand the time requirements, I think.)”

This is such an interesting email. He’s not saying something as simple as “the more email you reply to, the more you get.”  That doesn’t seem altogether true.

However, the more  trivial the email, and the more pure opinions are shared, and the less hard facts are used… now that creates a lot of email volleying back and forth, especially from people who just can’t resist the temptation to tell others their point of view.

I also like the idea of waiting until the dust settles.   I understand that Ronald Reagan did this — allowing opinions to be shared back and forth before weighing in.  This has a lot to do with timing a response for when it can have the greatest impact.

Or in other words, for a moment when it creates the least unnecessary new time demands.

This seems to be a worthy goal — to act in a way that creates the least number of new and unnecessary time demands.  I wonder what the impact of having mobile email has on expanding the amount of superfluous email that is sent around?

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The Case Against the Zero Inbox

mess-mso907_1b_stackofclutter_w609.jpgThere are a couple of arguments floating around out that militate against the idea of a Zero Inbox.

In my last post I gave the example of someone who has the problem of having thousands of unread emails.

The first comes from author Tim Ferriss, who has a practice of checking email only once every 1o days. He has an email autoresponder that lets people know that he has this practice, so they know not to try to reach him through this channel on urgent matters.

This strikes me as a non-solution to the issue of having too much email for most professionals.

For example, there are some places that one could move to here in Jamaica that are unreachable by cell phone, land-line, mail or donkey, but if I moved there tomorrow it wouldn’t stop people from trying to reach me. All that would happen is that they would stop trying.

When I made up my mind to come out of the bush the chances are good that I would have missed a few things… but I would have to set up my life to live with the consequences of my decision, and that, I think, is Tim’s goal.
However, lopping off channels of communication does not stop people from needing to be in contact with me, any more than going deaf would all of a sudden change my work-load. This is why I label Tim’s approach a non-solution to the problem most knowledge workers have. It solves his particular problem, but not many others’.

The underlying principle that he is using is sound, however. Check email on your schedule, not on anyone else’s. That is useful and worth implementing whether email is checked once an hour or once a month.

Another post I read by Scott Rosenberg entitled Empty Thine Inbox argues that the author does fine with his Inbox of 16,000+ messages. At the end of every year, he moves some 20,000 emails into a massive folder and starts all over again from ground zero. He claims that he is not suffering from overload, and that he can easily find whatever he needs, whenever he needs it, so to speak.

He says “At least under Allen’s “GTD®” model, you (along with maybe some relatives or colleagues) control the flow into your own in box of “things to do.” But anyone can stuff anything into your e-mail in box. If you accept (Mark) Hurst’s mission of “getting to zero,” it will keep eating up more of your day no matter how efficient you are. And you’ll be letting other people control your time.”

Huh?

There seems to be some confusion here between a piece of email and a time demand, to use 2Time language. The author seems to be conflating the two, and saying that the act of removing email from the inbox is the same as “letting other people control your time.”

Hitting the delete key once for each non-spam-filtered email doesn’t seem to me to be a big investment of time.

He continues to say: “The argument for the empty in box depends on the notion that a crowded in box is a psychic burden. But that’s only true if you feel that a crowded in box represents a failure. What if you don’t care — and you still Get your Things Done? What if you believe — as the book “A Perfect Mess” argued earlier this year — that neatness is overrated, and moderate disorganization is a sign of creativity and productivity? Messy is exuberant, and exuberance is beauty…”

I agree that an inbox of 16,000 items can become a psychic burden, but not because of the reason he gives – “that a crowded in box represents a failure.”

While setting aside the rest of the paragraph, I think that he might not be understanding the issue.

This might not be the case for him, but I have noticed that what remains in my inbox is not the stuff that I can easily delete, or even the items that require a short reply before being deleted. Those are easy enough to dispose of.

Instead, emails with the following attributes are the ones that cause me the most trouble:

1) they require some further thought before I decide what to do

2) they have important information that must be stored

3) they must be scheduled into my calendar for a convenient future moment of time

4) they have data that must be added to a list of items

5) they need to be married to some other information before action is possible (this category is especially troublesome!)

It might be the case that Rosenberg doesn’t have email that looks like the list I just made. From my work with knowledge workers, however, I know that the vast majority have a challenge of deciding which practice to employ when faced with email that they cannot make a simple decision about.

Ferriss’ solution is simple: ignore it, and train others to change the way they communicate to fit your habits.

However, most of us get stuck, and fearful that we might put the email in question someplace where it can get lost or forgotten, and we opt for the next best solution, which is to leave it in the Inbox.

At that moment, we realize that we have something that we need to remember, and in the absence of a quality time management system, we try to make a note of it in our memory. Take this simple, invisible action and multiply it by 16,000 times.

This is what causes the psychic burden that Rosenberg refers to, not the emails themselves. In other words, it’s not the sense of failure (there is none that I can see that needs to occur) but it is the “unfinished business” that gets started by us when we read email and don’t have an effective practice to deal with it.

The solution is to develop a set of individual habits that we can use to deal with the “unfinished business” in those emails. The 11 fundamentals of 2Time are one sample set of components with which these habits can be created.

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Making a Case for the Zero Inbox

In the recent argument between the time management gurus mentioned in my prior post, I came across an interesting articles that emphasized the need for a breakthrough in inbox management.

First  off, let me start by saying that it’s not a goal that everyone should seek, and this kind of commitment can only be entered into wholeheartedly by the individual user.

In the article “Escaping Email Overload,”  Lena West gives a great example of Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, who has 2400 unread emails in his email inbox and 721 unread emails in his Facebook inbox.

Ouch.

I just hope that your urgent email to him isn’t sitting around unread.  (Unfortunately, after only a few days of silence, un-replied email sometimes leads to thoughts and feelings in the mind of the sender so I hope that you aren’t feeling too bad if this is the case…. LOL)

West mentions the different approaches that people have taken to try to tame the email monster, ranging from various methods of sorting and filtering.  Some advocate ignoring the urgency of email as a matter of course, refusing, as Tim Ferris does, to answer email until he clears his inbox once every two weeks.

Hurst comes closest to the argument I make here in 2Time:  “Digital overload isn’t a function of too much e-mail; it’s a product of not managing your action items appropriately,” he says. 

When he responds to her email within twenty minutes she takes that as evidence that he must be doing something right.  I’m not so sure about that…

However, I agree with West completely when she says at the end:

“E-mail overload isn’t going to be spontaneously solved by installing software or adopting one guru’s approach. The right solution for you may not be the best solution for someone else. Because of that, addressing the issue takes trial and error.

When one system doesn’t work, try another until you find an approach that works for you–whether the solution is process, software or a combination of the two. E-mail is here to stay, and we all have to figure out what works for us individually.”

Well said. More help is needed on that front.

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Replying to Every Email

I can’t quite recall where I read this suggestion, but I have been trying it out and it seems to work.

It’s very simple – for every important piece of email, send a reply, even a short one, to say one of the following messages:

  1. Thanks
  2. It’s received and will be acted on and here’s the promised due date
  3. To ask a question

I think that this is a great suggestion, and the idea is to delete the email once a reply has been sent. I’m experimenting with this approach to see what comes of it, once again with the goal of achieving a Zero Inbox.

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Blackberry Insanity

blackberry31.jpgNew devices make it easier than ever for professionals to get stuck in unproductive activities that damage their peace of mind.

One of the more destructive habits that they enable is the ability to check email at all times during the day and night. In the thinking of the 2Time Management system, it enables a user to Capture all the time.

While this is very convenient, it’s a little like having a cell phone nearby all the time. Most of us have learnt that a ringing cell does not need to be answered just because it is ringing. This is a sure-fire way to at the least a drop in productivity, and at the very most, a certain insanity.

In other words, having the ability to download email at any moment only means that one must be more disciplined in capturing, not less, in order to preserve one’s productivity. Continue reading “Blackberry Insanity”

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The Ridiculously Overflowing Inbox

email-hell.jpgWhile there have been quite a few posts on various blogs about maintaining a Zero Inbox, or an Empty Inbox for email, I take the opposite tack and assert that an overflowing in-box of a sign of lack of productivity.

This is not meant as a value judgment or a moral conclusion.

Instead, it is meant to say that a full in-box is a sign that one or more of the 2Time practices has not been mastered. The truth is, an empty in-box is the result of several practices that have been mastered to a significant degree, although I couldn’t say which belt level it corresponds to yet. It is a complex result to accomplish.

Here are some ways to destroy the ideas of an Empty Inbox when performing the different practices of 2Time.

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The Email Inbox as a Mouth

mouth-3d_model_anat_openmouth_web1.jpgThe email in-box is nothing more than a mouth.

Huh?

Well, the mouth is an ideal capture point. It allows for temporary storage of a certain amount of food, and performs its function perfectly as a “staging area” for the process of digestion, and sending essential nutrition to the rest of the body.

When food stays too long in the mouth, trouble breaks out. The teeth, tongue, breath and gums all suffer when bits of food don’t make it out of the mouth. Clearly, it’s not intended to be a storage device.

In much the same way, the in-box was never intended to be a permanent storage area. It was only meant as a staging area, and when it gets abused, a user’s productivity instantly falls. If you have ever seen someone hunt through 4000 emails for a single piece of information (or if you have done it yourself), you know the frustration that comes from being buried by the result of having weak practices. Continue reading “The Email Inbox as a Mouth”