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# Saturday, February 04, 2006

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Email is Abused

I’ve been thinking about Email more and more lately. I firmly believe that email is a fantastic tool, and that it’s also heavily abused in the work place. More often than not, what you hear when you send an email is deafening silence or a flurry of incomprehensible replies breaking threading and screwing up the conversation flow.

It is my firm belief that many folks don’t have any system for dealing with their email. They get overwhelmed by the amount of mail that they have, and as a result are unpredictable in getting back to you (if they do).

What this means is that not only do you have to manage your inbox, but you have to manage their inbox. I’ve started to write things down that I want to talk to people about, and every so often, walk into their offices and talk about the issues. It’s weird as this is what I used to do long before email got crazy.

I created a section in OneNote called People. I have a page for every person, and an agenda. The next time I find myself talking to them, I pull up the page and check things off.

Life Hacks | Productivity
Posted Saturday, February 04, 2006    Permalink    Comments [2]  View blog reactions

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Sunday, February 05, 2006 2:09:55 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
This is exactly what I do, as well, and it works very, very well. I never forget something I need to someone talk about, and a long list is a good indication that a regular meeting with that person would be useful.

One thing I started to do about a month ago for folks I meet with regularly was date the list of items. When I meet with someone, we go through the list for that date. Action items get added automatically for our next meeting and anything we don't cover, I just drag and drop to next week/month/whatever. If I want to talk to someone in a month, I add an entry in the list under "03/05/2006" and then forget about it until then. I end up with a history of what was discussed and don't keep my brain cluttered with what to talk about when.
Jeff
Sunday, February 05, 2006 4:04:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
That's interesting. I've done two presentations of Getting Things Done at SnapStream, with half of the presentation focusing on Getting Things Done concepts, and the other half focusing on tactical implementation at the company.

As it turns out, there's a lot to say about the tactical part, because it's very easy to use inappropriate channels for communication and the people doing so tend to draw other people into their web as well. Ever had a long, drawn out conversation over e-mail? There are definitely classes of situations to avoid so that you can be more efficient.
Richard Kuo
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