We’ve always enjoyed giving you more here than just product updates. We like to share with you the happenings of the team, and various goings-on here in Mountain View, California. Our latest contributor will share how he manages his digital life in a series of posts.
I’m Evan, a developer on Windows Live Calendar. I have a fabulous but super busy life that would be impossible to manage without good time- and commitment-management tools. I love to share what I’ve learned, and because Windows Live is already designed to help you live your life this blog seemed like the perfect place to do that.
I’ll be posting every couple of weeks from here out with tips and ideas for making your life easier to manage. I’ll stick to talking about things that I’ve tried in my own life – no hopeful theories here. If there are tie-ins to Windows Live products I’ll show you how you can implement the ideas I talk about
So, where to start? Well, if you ever feel like you get too much email, the rest of this post is for you.
Too much email!
I hear “I get too much email” all the time. Email is great because it’s so easy. For that very reason though, we all seem to get a ton of it. I remember as a child my family got at most 10 pieces of snail mail in a day, and usually only 3-5. That’s pretty easy to manage. But what do you do if you get 20, 50, or 100 messages a day on top of your snail mail, voice mail, and text messages? How do you manage it effectively?
I get well over 120 emails a day just at my work address. I’m certainly not perfect, but here is one strategy that has worked for me.
Avoid Email Purgatory
For emails that I could read and immediately forget about or act on, there really wasn’t a problem. The problem arose when I got an email I couldn’t or didn’t want to act on the first time I saw it. If I wanted to come back to something later I just marked it as unread.
Herein begins the problem. I’d come back later and I’d have a whole bunch more emails that I didn’t want to deal with right then. So those would sit there too. Not long after, it would get pushed onto the 2nd and then 3rd page of my inbox and I’d never see or remember it again.
Those emails got into Email Purgatory, where emails go when they’re not quite ready to move on.
That’s not a pretty picture of me, but there it was. People spent the time to write me email and I saved it eternally on Page 2 (or 200).
Now, I mostly didn’t care if emails from e-commerce sites went into Email Purgatory. That was fine. But the question remained, how do I keep important emails out of Email Purgatory? Well, there are several problems here, so I’ll start with the easy answer.
No easy answer
The easy answer is that there’s no easy answer. One of the most important issues at play was (and is) purely a mental thing. I simply had not disciplined myself to do something with all those emails, so they spilled over to Page 2 rather quickly. What worked here was obvious. Make a conscious effort to do something to permanently handle each email as it comes in, or have a time set aside for that each day. Delete, reply to, act on, or file appropriately any mails you get. Seems simple – and it is simple – but it’s not easy.
I’d love to say “I’m fixed! I never let this happen anymore!” but that would be a lie. I have good days and bad days on this. Interestingly, it actually feels like I get less email on the good days but it’s probably the same amount. Actually, very recently I did some more work that helped here, but I’ll save that for another post. (It still took discipline, though.)
The next thing I discovered was that even with discipline I do get occasional emails that drift onto Page 2. These are emails where I have to take significant action before I can reply or otherwise resolve the mail. They would just sit there unread until I did the job, and sometimes they’d get into Purgatory before I did anything about them. That was bad.
Next time: How Evan uses to-do lists to stay out of email purgatory!
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