All tagged email
Some thoughts on email inspired by a recent New York Times opinion piece by Adam Grant, “No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude.” My favorite rule of thumb: To get less email, send less email. Other people will be less inclined to fill my mailbox with replies if I don’t send requests/replies to them in the first place.
I've had "Stop Letting Email Control Your Work Day" by Paul A. Argenti flagged for follow-up since it was posted a month ago. The title is pretty obvious: so many people let email control their work day. This doesn't make sense - it is a tool like any other and should be controlled by the wielder, not the other way around.
Personal productivity writers and thinkers harp on and on about email. And for good reason - our default behavior around email creates a lot of chaos. Dan Ariely has been thinking about this and the result was "A Behavioral Economist Tries to Fix Email" in The Atlantic earlier this month.
Everyone wants to kill email. I'm no fan of it either, but it does serve a purpose - a purpose that no other tool serves quite as well. Or more specifically, better than any SINGLE tool serves.
The recommendation? Give it a whirl - try something more focused on the task at hand. And if it doesn't work, email will always be there, like an old habit that you can't break.
The Boston Globe, David Allen and Farhad Manjoo all have me thinking about personal productivity, and how to go about creating the necessary focus.
We need to do a better job of helping our colleagues - and helping ourselves - see the whole picture when a change is at hand. What are people really trying to DO?
A tech firm has publicized their desire to phase out work email. That is a new way to reach Inbox Zero.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" applies to email just as it applied to letters in the 17th Century.
Here is a suggestion: Instead of sending email, step back for ten seconds and reflect on: Does this need to be sent? Can I contact the person directly instead?
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.
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.
The Xobni blog has a practical suggestion on making email easier to manage for your recipients with better subject lines.
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.
Josh Jacobs, the president of X-1, talks with Dan Keldsen about email triage in a world of desktop search.
The Chicago Tribune had an article on e-mail addiction that focused on Marsha Egan and her 12-Step program for overcoming e-mail addiction.
Michael Sampson has a great summary of the ongoing discussion about whether email can be considered a collaboration tool. The thing I want to highlight is realization that most of the problems associated with email have nothing to do with email itself.
Emily Turrettini at SmartMobs references a piece by Jeff Zaslow in the WSJ, "How You Handle Your Email Inbox Says a Lot About You."