2. Snooze emails - http://www.followup.cc/ [ed] not a bad idea, but not in love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party
My first thought reading this is that it Gmail should have a similar feature that says "Remind me at X time unless this thread becomes active again".
Fairly often, I send an email expecting a reply and don't want to forget about it if I don't get one. But I also don't want to either a) keep the thread in my inbox or b) make a task/calendar event to track it.
I take 5 minutes each hour or two to check my emails and respond as fast as possible to respond-able items (and archiving them right away), move actionable items to my to-do list (again archiving them right away, though sometimes keeping info on my to-do app), and trash all unrequested/notreallyinterested emails ASAP.
Aside, my inbox always has from 0 to 10 items in it, which I think this is more then manageable. Items may include threaded conversation though, so it could very well be 9 items and 30 items in one slot. I keep some emails in my inbox because I haven't been able to close the particular conversation. If we're discussing something that I can't take action on I just leave it there until I wrap the communication.
My emails are 90% of the time two or three sentences long. If I can answer with a 'yes' or a 'no' I will. Most people I correspond with also know that I have a very short attention span with email content so they also keep it as short as possible. I tend to just not respond amazingly long emails.
tl;dr Just go over the list as fast as you can deleting as much as possible first, archiving as much as possible second and then taking direct action on the emails themselves. And keep it short (which I see the irony of since this comment is magnitudes too long).
PD: Oh and I disagree with the phone. Generally it's a way to extend conversations and wastes time and productivity.
I have been striving towards joining the inbox zero train, All my mails from the last month has either been converted to tasks or filed in some way.
The only noticeable improvement I have seen is that I go thorough all my emails (I might have ignored a few whose subject line didn't catch my attention in the past) making me catch some semi-important things I might have missed.
Unfortunately filing in Outlook has its disadvantages as search only works on the whole mailbox or one folder at a time, hence if a mail can be categorized in 2 folders, you might have to search twice (which looks stupid when someone is standing over your head).
6. Set aside 1 hour sometime this week to go through your emails and kill them.
Seeing and thinking "1 - 100 of hundreds" is psychologically tiring. Get it off your mind. Set aside an hour sometime this week and get through it all. Set an appointment in MobileMe or Google Calendar or whatever. You might not want to inbox zero right this moment—that's okay. Just postpone it, but get it done.
Is this an evil cross post? I put this on Chris' blog comments:
I use a bit of a hodge podge of rules and systems, too. When an email comes in I apply the "2 minute rule". If it's 2 minutes or less to reply or do whatever needs to be done, it gets done right away. Any longer than that and I reply to the person who sent it and BCC in my Highrise dropbox and "task" dropbox - that way a task gets added (I usually have to modify the subject line of the email so that the task looks right in Highrise) and I also have reference to the entire email through highrise in the search. When I reply, I tell the person when I will get to it, and that determines the task dropbox I use in Highrise - ie. if I'm going to get to it today, I BCC my "today" dropbox, if I'm going to get to it tomorrow, this week or next week etc.
If the task has a specific time and date I either add it in Highrise or if I'm on the move, I add it as a TODO or meeting entry on my Nokia which then uses GooSync to Sync up to my Google Calendar.
If the email is something that I can't schedule or reply to immediately, I save it in a folder with a priority, "p1", "p2" etc. If I've got a bunch of emails in p1 etc. I'll send an email to my Highrise dropbox for later on (tomorrow, thisweek, nextweek etc) to review that inbox so that I don't forget I've got stuff sitting there (I read my email in Pine so I don't have a "folder list" sitting there).
If the email is personal and one that will take longer than 2 minutes to respond to, I save it in "letters" which I usually go through once every few weeks on a weekend when I feel like doing some long form communications :)
Additionally I block off some time in my Calendar each week to ensure I review all inboxes and task lists in Highrise to ensure nothing slips through the cracks, and sometimes on a Monday I'll spend a good 2 hours getting a bunch of random inbox cruft out of the way before I start work.
This is all geared towards being able to deal with prioritisation on the fly when I'm deep in the coding zone or working to a deadline with lots of peripheral things like support requests, sales calls, proposals etc. that still have to get done.
The most important thing is having somewhere to stick anything that comes in so that you will always get to it later, and that the time you get to it is going to be appropriate to the task (ie. no point in reviewing an email 3 months down the track that was requesting a quote for a site to be deployed next week!)
Sanebox has a nice implementation of the "Hit the snooze button" idea (just tag/refile to SaneLater and it will reappear in your inbox later). Feels great to punt on some emails.
actually you put the email into either @SaneTomorrow or @SaneNextWeek depending on whether you want it to reappear in your Inbox tomorrow morning or Monday morning. But it is a cool feature :-)
The only benefit listed here is "the mysteriously wonderful feeling." More often I get the "slowly sinking feeling" of having deleted an important email.
Storage is so cheap now that saving thousands of messages is not really a big deal, and it's often useful to be able to search through everything you've written or received.
Presumably the OP is suggesting that one's inbox be of zero length, not that you actually delete the message... File emails you wish to retain in a suitable folder - they'll be waiting for you when you need them.
I find it surprising how out-of-vogue the phone is — so much stuff is just faster on the phone!"
As a general rule I very strongly disagree with this.
The phone is a good tool if you enjoy revisiting the same discussion again, and again, and again, each time with a "telephone game" (there's a reason it was named such) misinterpretation of everything that was previously discussed.
Sure, there are appropriate discussions that can take place over the phone, but in this industry it's usually a good interpersonal vehicle, but a horrendous way of coming to decisions or communicating ideas.
> Sure, there are appropriate discussions that can take place over the phone, but in this industry it's usually a good interpersonal vehicle, but a horrendous way of coming to decisions or communicating ideas.
I very strongly disagree with this. Email correspondence is subject to subpoena; there is some stuff that just should not be said in email for liability reasons. It's also easy for someone to miss something in a longer email, or for a couple people to have to go back and forth several times to clarify a point or explain incorrect interpretations.
Phone calls are very useful when they are supplemented with note-taking, especially in the context of work tickets * . You communicate ideas more quickly, you are completely in control of what is on the record, and it's much more difficult to have misunderstandings.
* At my current job, when we have a phone call we record in the work ticket a summary of the relevant (non-sensitive) details of the discussion along with the deliverables.
1. "I was going to email back but I thought it would be easier to call" followed by an unnecessarily long conversation that covers very little of use, and then one party having to email something to the other anyway. You can't copy and paste via the phone. You can't attach files~. Those two things are very common in my business!
2. The call which starts "I've just sent you an email. Have you got it yet?" "Nope, how long ago did you send it?" "Oh, just now. Oh wait, it's still in my outbox, wait a sec." Followed by a bland wait. This also happens far too often (1-2 times/day).
~ Last time I thought about this I got sidetracked imagining a stupid venture where you could send an attachment (emailed or via file upload) to a phone number. If the service had an email on file for that phone number, it'd just pass it on. If not, it'd robo-call the number to give a pick-up code and web address. Of course, the people that don't have email addresses (concreter needs a builders drawing, etc) are generally those who would be confused as hell by a robo-call talking about file downloads...
You're so correct. Why use the phone when I can answer on my terms and time with a two sentence answer in less than 10 seconds. Using the phone takes those 10 seconds just to call the person. The phone is a tool for emergencies and to shorten distance, not to make conversations longer than they should be.
When you are one of two or three people in an open ended back-and-forth conversation, often a 15 minute phone call can save a dozen three paragraph emails (plus the dozen interruptions) over the course of several hours. You get your answer sooner, you have fewer total interruptions, and you spend less time over-explaining, because listeners can instantly indicate their understanding.
Email is a relatively low-bandwidth channel that's inappropriate for high-bandwidth problems. Sometimes, a 5 sentence email is great. Other times, you need phone call. Sometimes, it's worth flying to meet somebody face to face for an hour.
That may be so on your case, but I've found in my experience that generally if a phone call is more productive than email it's because the topic at hand has not been developed enough to use a quick action based method to deal with the communication. I believe there are three situations in which a phone call is better than an email. A sales pitch, which would be a gazillion times more efficient if done face to face; a brainstorming conversation, which would be a lot better if it was divided in a solitary work period followed by a cumulative peer based review in person; and when there's a imperative need to switch directions ASAP, which will hinder productivity anyways however you look at it.
Of course your millage may vary and I'm not trying to convince you your're wrong, specially because you aren't since this is a a topic very influences by personal preference. I just find that every instance where the telephone could outdo an email, is because either the parties involved where not properly prepared with the required resources in their possession, or because the type of communication was not meant to be written in the first place. Generally this last type works better in person. Almost always.
Chris should probably do a post on how he uses the phone. He's very quick but never feels abrupt.
I often have a problem with letting people know a call is over and I need to move on. So, like you say, calls often become a time suck for me and I avoid them.
1. Remember that a lot of other people don't like being on the phone, either, especially during the work day. When your reason for calling has been resolved, it's perfectly acceptable to say, "Well that's all I had, thank you." If it's someone you know, say that you'll see them soon (if you really will), or that you'll call them later that night or that week (if you intend to).
2. For those people who will keep going on and on, go into the conversation with clear goals and an exit strategy. To end the call, tell the other party that you have other calls to make, work to get back to, or strategically make the call before a meeting or appointment or in transit (e.g., about to enter a subway).
1. Write short well-formated emails [ed] see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808059
2. Snooze emails - http://www.followup.cc/ [ed] not a bad idea, but not in love with forwarding my personal/work emails to a 3rd party
3. separate tasks from emails [ed] I think the wonderful thing about inbox0 is that with an Action/Waiting folder your emails becomes your task list.
4. pick up the phone [ed] this works great most of the time, but can also be a total time sink.