New year,
better newsletter model; may both be for the
best! In 2010 I will focus each issue on one
specific theme. We’ll have practical tips, analysis, opinion
and resources, all touching on that one subject. Seems to me
this will make the newsletter a better read and of more
benefit to you, my readers.
Cheers, This issue’s theme: Personal Email Coping
Strategies The deluge of email in organizations has
many solutions, which fall roughly into two classes:
organizational and personal. In my business I focus on the
former, helping companies change the causes of overload and
reap the benefits. But as I do this I run into numerous
systems devised by individual users to cope with the load; and
I’m always happy to share ideas in that space (see here).
Personal strategies have their limitations, but they play an
important role, as I argue below.
What YOU can do about it
Actionable Tip: Process email in preset time
slots only. I can't overstress this one:
checking one's email 24x7 is a big killer of productivity and
peace of mind. A good arrangement is 1-2 slots daily,
preferably at those times of the day when you are least
creative. If you adopt this tip alone, you’ll go from the
harmful mode of “continuous partial attention” (more here)
to at least partial ability to focus!
Q: OMG,
what if someone needs to contact me urgently between
slots? A: That's what telephones, IM, and SMS are
for, remember? Food for Thought
Perhaps the most
important step in mounting a personal campaign to reclaim your
life and sanity from email overload is the simple act of
deciding to do something about it. I’ve seen this happen: it’s
the sudden realization that there is a better way, that you
don’t have to be on constant call, that you can decide your
priorities yourself rather than having anyone with an email
connection define them for you.
The decision to
adopt a definite strategy – any strategy – is like the
decision to exercise, or to go on a diet: important,
exhilarating, and the beginning of the path to a worthy goal.
Analysis and Opinion The reason I prefer to work on
organizational solutions is that they treat the problem at the
source. One careless sender can cause harm to 100 recipients
with a click; obviously we’re better off focusing on taming
the senders, and that requires coordination of expectations
and “group contracts” across a large group. In fact, I
often run across the comment that improving behavior in a
small team is useless because much of the mail comes from the
rest of the company... And then there’s the fact that the root
causes of the mess always reside deep in the company’s
culture, and that is beyond the purview of individual
solutions. Thus, the company (or a largely independent subset)
is where I try to make the change happen.
This raises
the question of why bother to address individual strategies at
all? There are a number of reasons to do that too.
Individuals are what groups are made of; having them
take control of their immediate interactions will at a
minimum raise awareness, which does affect the group’s
ability to improve.
Changing corporate culture is often a slow and difficult
process; helping employees reduce their burden, even if
imperfect, brings them some very needed relief.
There
is a risk here too, however: it’s been known to happen that
deploying some individual tips and training has been used by
management as an excuse to avoid digging into the root causes
at the group level, which sort of misses the whole point. A
wisely crafted solution program, as can be seen in
better-managed groups, will include both types of solutions
together, reaping the benefits of both in parallel. Solutions and Resources Getting Things Done Getting
things done (abbreviated GTD)
is a book, a system, a philosophy, and – almost – a religion,
or at least an ideology. It has its supporters and detractors,
but no one can disagree that it is the basis of many variants
of personal coping strategies for handling information
overload.
The original book was written by David Allen
in 2001, and has gone on to become a bestseller. The system it
describes is based on the idea that to be productive and
stress-free you have to manage all your myriad tasks in a
methodical manner: track them in lists that you review daily,
prioritize and execute them by a systematic process. I won’t
go into the details – either you know them or you can look it
up. What I will point out is that this system is, to my mind,
a survivor of the “classic” time management era, in that it
applies quite well to paper based work with manila folders and
wooden document trays; yet it lends itself extremely well to
managing the load in our electronic age. So well, that there
are many adaptations, software tools and web sites involving
the system. 43
folders and Lifehacker
are two blogs that show a lot of this influence.
Many
of the personal email coping tips I use and teach have
equivalents in GTD. For instance, the principle of touching
every email only once (act on it if you can do it in under 2
minutes, else delete, delegate or file it for future action);
or the use of specific folders for items requiring similar
follow up, such as a folder for messages you sent that require
follow-up to assure reply. Many tools and systems out there
use these and related ideas, and in a sense GTD is the
spiritual source of them all.
It is fairly easy to
apply GTD by using the existing capabilities of Outlook and
other email clients; but many vendors have released tools or
guides that make the adaptation even better. ClearContext
and Orla
for Outlook and GTDinbox
for Gmail are examples.
GTD isn’t for everyone – some
find it too regimented for their style – but it’s definitely
something you should be aware of. Here
it is, then!
Snapshots of Ingenuity We were
debating the pros and cons of the iPad or Kindle
compared to a book... and someone pointed out that in one
sense they’re a throwback to antiquity: they are essentially
serial access devices, just like the scrolls used by our
ancestors millennia ago. It then occurred to me to ask, who
invented the idea of cutting the scroll into small pieces and
sewing them at one edge into a random access, compact, bound
book?
Turns out that this construct – originally
called a Codex
– was invented by the Romans in the first century AD.
Hats off to this act of superb inventiveness by
that quintessentially modern nation!
