Inbox Zero
A couple of weeks ago, Jeremy wrote that he can’t keep up with his bloated inbox anymore and there were some good ideas in that post’s comments. The ever-increasing Inbox seems to be a problem for more and more people. Some people try to be part of the solution and not the problem. I, for one, like writing “complete” e-mails, so restricting myself into 5 sentences might not be for me – except at work, where I think many of us have this problem and keeping e-mail short and clear is always a good policy.
What I’m afraid of in restricting your e-mails to certain length is that it makes e-mail into IM or SMS (something the guys at sentenc.es see as a good thing). In these mediums (or media, to be correct) the character-limit, in my opinion, forces you to leave a lot of context out of your message, rendering the message to more akin to a stream of consciousness. I like to think that e-mail as more a self-contained thing.
Anyway, the net’s premier productivity guy, Merlin Mann, recently gave a speech about “Inbox Zero” at Google. If you have an hour to spend in sake of productivity, take a look at his presentation.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925]
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” If you have an hour to spend in sake of productivity, take a look at his presentation.”
Lol, what an ironic way to end a blog-post.
2 points. In Jeremy’s post, I posted a short 2/3-step guide on how to deal with mail. I believe it works quite effectively and am pretty sure it reflects Merlin’s method as well. The underlying principle is not to respond to every mail but deal with all mail, aka an action-based method.
As far as length is concerned, I don’t really see why people need a guide for that (hence my rant about self-help a few months ago). Sometimes 2 words suffice, sometimes an essay. It’s all varied and highly personal.
Second, after having used Facebook for a few weeks now and seeing most of my communication moving there, I believe that a closed network is a good solution to much of the useless mail we get (around 99% for me). I see much communication moving there and hope there will be an api in the future to shift it to mail-clients.
As a general note, I think people need to remember or pay attention to how they interact with real people in the real world and apply this to the digital realm. Even though we sit in front of them, we are not machines. We only have so much bandwidth for information, and we should listen to our own subconscious signals (stress, fatigue, headache, etc.) to know when too much is too much.
…sorry for the long response. Probably should’ve written a blogpost about it.
Incidentally, part of the reason at least that I think Jeremy has so much mail to deal with, can probably be found in his post on all the newsletters he subscribes too.
[...] mail and message-client I already wrote a little about this on Kari’s recent post on Inbox Zero, but I think Facebook’s closed messaging system is a great way to combat spam and feels very [...]
I haven’t watched the video yet, but I suggest people who can’t seem to get started with inbox-zero is to:
1) make a folder called inbox-archive
2) copy entire inbox into this folder
3) work out of your now empty inbox and try to knock off your “archives” as fast as you can
Good luck!