When it comes to managing e-mail, I feel like the most incompetent person on the planet.
I’ve been dealing with e-mail for half of my life. Over time, my primary client has moved from elm to Eudora to Outlook Express to Pine to Apple’s Mail. Every time I switched, I’d hoped that I’d leave behind some of my lesser e-mail habits, thinking that they were a product of the user interface or the limitations of the program. It never happened. The fact is, I’m just really bad with managing e-mail, and that’s nobody’s fault but my own.
Witness my inbox. 141 messages — down from 180 last night — 75 unread. The oldest is from — no foolin’ — May 19, 2003. (135 are from 2004, at least. Oh, wait. That was last year.) I don’t just leave dealt-with messages in my inbox — they’re all little action items. Reminders of commitments unfulfilled, friends left adrift, people peeved.
Every few months, in a fit of electronic neatness, I’ll pare down my inbox. Sometimes I’ll spend hours responding to old messages, each e-mail beginning with “I’m so sorry…” At others times I’ll take messages that are a year old and quickly, at arm’s length, file them, never to be seen again. Many I leave unread, lest the recipient detect that I received the message by my handling of it, in hopes that I can plead genuine innocence if challenged about it in the future.
I answer all of my e-mail most days, before I go to bed. But I pick the low-hanging fruit: people who need a quick response, or some small action on my part. (This is the worst part.) E-mail that requires more thought — e-mail about which I care — stays in my inbox. Within a couple of days, the 1-2 daily messages that are left come midnight have pushed that e-mail beyond my 23-message viewpane, and I don’t discover it again until I play digital archaeologists weeks or months later. Strangers hear back from me in minutes. Good friends may never get a response.
OK, there. Now I have 116 messages. 25 people who e-mailed nancies.org about something will never get a response. But it’s been 6 months — perhaps it’s worked itself out in the meantime.
I have 24 messages from the past 36 hours that I haven’t been able to respond to, though I’ve dealt with easily five times as messages in that same period. Those 24 taunt me. A pair of interview requests. A job offer. Two strangers who would like me to call them — could we work together on this? An e-mail from an old friend. Two action alerts from the Virginia ACLU. And so on. All interest me. I would like to act on them. I intend to.
Something has to change. Maybe I need to get less e-mail? An autoresponse to strangers, telling them that I may or may not be able to get back to them? Or maybe I should stop using my inbox as a todo list? (That seems like a no-brainer.) Or I should segment it out — one inbox for personal matters, one for political matters, one for nancies.org, and one for school?
To this end, Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders has been of some help. It’s an organization blog — all about how to arrange the mechanics of life, notably computers, in a manner that facilitates getting stuff done. If I could just apply what I’ve learned on the site since it launched, I’d probably be better off.
I’ll just put that on my todo list. By…erm…e-mailing myself.
One strategy I like is to separate stuff that needs just a response from stuff that needs timely action (versus, of course, stuff that needs…nothing). You might try throwing the “response” stuff into one folder and then answering as much as you can at a pass 1-3 times a day. That’s worked pretty well for me.
I think the key is not to be intimidated or overwhelmed by a big pile; just make a deal with yourself to answer five at a time, and you can chip away over a couple days and get back to zero. Hopefully. :-)
Another thing is to be honest with yourself–if you know in yr heart that you have no intention of answering an email, just file it away or delete it. It’s not doing any good making you feel bad.
Wow…sounds exactly like my email habits. Except for the ACLU messages, of course.
Anyway, you’re not alone.
JB