Sometime last year I wrote a post in which I realized out loud that I’d changed from a Stay-at-home-mom into a Work-from-home-mom. This is now the post where I realize out loud that work has changed from a part time job into a full time one. I used to spend 10-20 hours per week. Now I spend about 30 hours per week with occasional dips into 20 hours or spikes into 40 or more hours. This change happened with the shipping of Tub of Happiness, but I did not realize it at the time. Because I did not recognize the increase in my work load, I did not shift the schedule to account for it. This January I did shift the schedule, but I didn’t fully realize why I had to do it until I realized that all the intended spaces in the new schedule were already filled with things.
A good example of this is my email box. It used to be that I’d get 0-3 emails on any given day. Because I’m compulsive about checking my email, I would catch them as they arrived and reply to them within hours. Then we started shipping books. Suddenly I started getting daily statements about credit card receipts for the day. I’d let those collect in my box until accounting day when I’d enter them all into my financial tracking software. I did the same with electronic receipts for orders placed online. Customer service emails began to show up in my box. Those needed quick responses. So that the emails that needed responses did not get lost in the clutter, I’d click the star icon next to it. This worked well and so I did it for every email that I couldn’t respond to right away, but needed to respond to.
Lately the system has stopped working so well. My mailbox gets buried under 20 or 30 emails and many of them have stars next to them. Right now I have a dozen emails that need responses of one kind or another. It weighs on my mind and makes me feel behind to have so many messages waiting for a response from me. And yet I’m afraid of throwing things into a filing system until after I’ve responded. If I don’t have the reminder right in front of my face, I’ll forget to respond at all. I have started pulling the receipt emails out of my inbox. They just create too much clutter. Unfortunately comments to this blog also get caught in this task mess. I’ll read a comment and want to respond, but don’t have the brainspace right that moment. So I tag it for later. Sometimes I actually get back to comment responses. Other times I just have to let it go without responding. I just don’t have enough time to track everything.
I like being involved. I like that I am necessary enough that I’m constantly getting email. I could do without the increasing amount of spam. But I need to pay attention to my handling of email to see if I can manage it better. It frustrates me when I discover an email that has been waiting three days for a response from me. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
Fabian and I both have this problem, too. (Different jobs, similar email loads.)
We’ve adopted the habit of sending a quick reply to each response-required email as it comes in, even if it’s just “Thanks for the info. I’ll take care of [insert required task here] within the next few days”.
That way, the sender at least knows that the email has been received, and I feel like I’ve got a little breathing room to take care of whatever-it-is and send a more detailed response.
I get on the order of 1500 non-spam e-mails a day at work. This is a mind-boggling number.
Of those, perhaps a whole thousand are automatic messages, that get sorted into folders for archival purposes (I can search them for information that I might need, later)
Which leaves us with about five hundred. Still, an amount of information that is hard to wrap my head around.
Of those, perhaps 300 are in threads that I’ve marked “don’t need to worry about anymore”
Which leaves us with 200 or so. Still a huge number, but getting better.
Ok, so about 150 are new discussion threads that I scan briefly and realize “this isn’t relevant to me.” I then mark as such. This takes about 20 seconds per. So, about an hour and a half out of my 8 hour day.
But, we’re now down to a mere(!) 50 e-mails. And my method for dealing with them is actually probably useful to you.
These are usually one of three types of message: Machine sent messages that require me looking at them (stack traces, crash logs, etc) so that I can figure out what went wrong, and log bugs against them.
Or, mailing list traffic that pertains to either my dept, or one of the projects that I’m working on. One of two things happens here. If it’s going to require a detailed response, I move it to a folder marked “Respond To” And I have blocks of time (Usually 9-10am, 1-2pm, 5-6pm) that I start at the top of those, sorted by date (oldest first) and reply to them. The “oldest first” rule means that I’m never totally out of date.
However, if their is a response that is just a couple of lines, I do it, right there, right then. Even if the response is “Ok, I’ve added X to my workflow, my boss will schedule it, it’ll get pushed to the calendar, we’ll talk about it later.” (which, somedays, seems to be all that ever happens to me)
The third type of message are the ones that are directly to me, from others in the company. These get sorted into “can deal with in under a minute” “need to deal with now” “can deal with later, but still urgent” and “non-urgent”. Non-urgent is just that. They’re either ideas, or jokes sent around, links to webcomics, etc. Stuff that isn’t urgent. (Not to sayt aht I don’t spend plenty of time reading them, but..) “deal with later, still urgent” gets dumped into that “Respond To” folder, but flagged as urgent. So, really, I go through those, date first, urgent/mailing list in that order replying to. Still, however, only in those hour chunks of time. Still, that’s three hours a day, but that’s life in a corporate world. Urgent stuff, I drop everything and deal with, right then.
This method lets me put stuff off but still deal with it, get done the things I absolutely, positively need to get done right then, and still have time to, you know, actually work on stuff. 🙂
GMail and Labels
This may or may not help you in the future, however I use it extensively in the GMail interface: Labels. There’s a few tips and tricks to get mail to bend to your will, the first is this: you can have mail appended with a tag directly in your email address. An example I use is e0steven+billsATgmail. This is a valid email address to Gmail e0steven being my username and the +tag added to the end and will end up in my inbox. The only caveat is that some companies won’t accept a + character as a valid character in an email address, but most will.
Now you can use a filter to automatically tag emails to the account ‘account+bills’ with a specific label. Head to Settings at the top of the screen, then Filters, Create a New Filter (if you don’t have one already), enter youraddress+tag@gmail.com in the To: box, You can automatically star it if desired or check Apply Label then Make new label (or pick one if you already have one). Finally click create filter.
Now to view your ‘labeled’ items click the label you want to see on the left navigation.
Hope it helps!
-Eric S.
I do not envy your email load. Thanks for the good suggestions.
Re: GMail and Labels
Hmm. I’ll have to try some of this since my primary mailbox is also gmail. Thanks.
Good suggestion. Thanks!
Re: GMail and Labels
No problem, I hope it’s helpful! It took me a while to get my inbox tamed but it’s much cleaner and neater now.
-Eric S
On the subject of spam, I used to get tons of it. I still do get some, but these days it’s not much hassle for 2 reasons:
1) Agent (my client-of-choice) now has Bayesian filtering, and once it’s learned it does cope quite well, although I always look at least at the subject lines in the junk folder
2) and this is the biggest difference, I move from an ISP-based address to my own domain name and hosting package. The huge advantage to this in the spam stakes was the ability to reject all messages NOT sent to an address on a whitelist. So anything that speculatively sends to “joe@ or other random names, mostly gets bounces. Any time I want an address for something, it takes seconds to create a new one, which can also be coded so I know if it’s been passed on.
The real addresses are never let loose on usenet news. I have one for that, which is spamtrapped, and that attracts large amounts of spam, but is never read. People wanting to contact me are required to have the ability to notice the spamtrap and deal with it.
If You don’t have a chance to respond…
I won’t take it personally. Life gets busy some times and I know that without your help Howard would be lost.
Ona