I hold that the best way to deal with this is to encourage fewer people to send you email. Of course, before that happens you still need some solutions for triaging when there is too much.
All in personal effectiveness
I hold that the best way to deal with this is to encourage fewer people to send you email. Of course, before that happens you still need some solutions for triaging when there is too much.
Just think. If you write in public, it is both easier to find you AND when they do, the conversation can be at a higher level. Luis Suarez makes me think.
There are a lot of interesting conversations happening recently about knowledge management and the value of knowledge sharing or knowledge collecting and what it all means. KM is about taking action.
How Smart Leaders Talk About Time is a "Conversation Starter" from HarvardBusiness.org in October. It talks about the the struggle so many businesses have of having too many things to do and prioritizing amongst them. What is a leader to do?
It's hard to be actively involved in the online world and thinking about how it affects your life and those around you and not know about Seth Godin. Here is an interview with him that makes some connection to how people should operate their lives in today's world.
Is juggling several tennis balls while telling a joke multitasking? Not according to an interesting discussion from Stowe Boyd.
Patti Anklam covers about five years worth of research and writing in her extensive summary.
Is email useful or not? This topic has gotten some energy lately from Luis Suarez and Andrew McAfee (and others). It's clear to me that email is simply not th eright tool for collaboration.
Shocking news everyone: Multitasking doesn't work. Stanford research shows that it doesn't, at least when walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Information overload can be considered an individual problem to be solved by many of the rules I've written about in my own journey around personal effectiveness. Or it can be thought of as part of a larger system of people interacting that needs to be addressed with a systematic approach.
Johanna Rothman suggests that one of the shortest words in the English language, is also one of the hardest to say. So, why is it?
Sally McGhee has a piece on the things we tell ourselves about productivity at the Microsoft at Work blog.
After years and years of promises and science fiction and tons of money spent on artificial intelligence research (in which I participated), computers are still slow and not prone to learning from user behavior.
The Xobni blog has a practical suggestion on making email easier to manage for your recipients with better subject lines.
There's a potential conflict between Getting Things Done and Just Do It. Here are some thoughts on the topic.
Craig Roth has posted his view on how the (Enterprise) Attention Management lens can look at the technical side of email to help with the information overload issue.
With apologies to my dear friend Luis Suarez and his goal of eliminating email, there are just times when email does the job fairly well.
Mark Foster has an interesting entry, "Acting in One's Own Best Interests." Essentially he suggests that the highest form of achievement comes when people act in their own best interests.