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It's not the amount of email I *receive* that's the problem...

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...it's the amount I send.

This was brought home to me five minutes ago. I'm sat at home, digging my way out of my inbox (trying to reach Zero Email Bounce), and somehow I ended up in my Sent Items folder. "Wow", I thought, "that seems kinda full".

One Outlook search folder later (sent:today from:me) and I'm stunned to find that I've sent 47 emails today. Of those, 45 have been work-related. I'd need to average one email every 10 minutes, with another 10 minutes off for lunch, to send those during an 8-hour work day. And yet I also squeezed in three meetings, several hallway discussions, and some work on our team infrastructure.

At least now I know where the day went.

(If you want to learn how to cope with incoming email, I like Stever Robbins' "Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload" and Ole Eichorn's "The Tyranny of Email". If anyone knows how to cut down on sending email, I'm all ears. Although "stop working with interesting projects and passionate people" isn't an option!)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2005
    What you need to communicate, you need to communicate. Once you separate the essential communications from the fluff, the question remaining is "Is email the best way to communicate this?"

    If it is really urgent then a phone call, an instant message or a personal visit might be the best way. If it is important and it is important that it be permanent or semi-permanent but it isnt urgent then you can blog it, post it at the bulletin board, file it as a formal record, etc. and let your "audience" read it at their convenience. If its important but its not urgent and its very transient then email might be the best way.

    If its not important and its not urgent well its probably just a social, personal communication that you can do during "downtime".

    My 2C =)
  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    July 15, 2005
    You cut down on sending mail by:

    1) walking to that person's office and telling them what you want.
    2) IM'ing them using Office Communicator

    of course this only works for some types of email.
  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2005
    I like Frans' approach. If I still send 45 emails a day, but only take 2 minutes per email, that'll still leaves me with 6.5 hours a day to actually get work done. And while I'll probably have to send a few more emails (because some people won't get the message the first time round), it should still be a net win. Interesting experiment. I'll try it :)

    Omar - sadly, only about 1/4 of my team are on IM. And going to talk to them is definitely going to take more than 10 minutes, unless I really practice my just-here-to-ask-a-question-thanks-bye social skills. Hmmm. Maybe that'll be experiment #2...