Slashdot Mirror
E-Mail Addiction 12-Steps Stumbles
netbuzz writes "Talk about offering an alcoholic a drink? No. 2 of 12-step program for e-mail addiction: "Commit to keeping your inbox empty." ... Reuters is reporting today on this program from an executive coach. Here are 11 other reasons why it won't work." I know what the bottom of my inbox looks like, I just only get to see it for a few minutes a year.
A large portion of the time spent on many people's email is deleting & weeding through SPAM, and if you didn't get a single piece of spam, you'd spend a lot less time in your inbox...and what time you did spend would be productive.
Post it's kill trees. To be more environmentally friendly, maybe you should send yourself an email about it.
Or just start to realize that you recieve roughly ZERO mails a year that need a 2-minute response.
Honestly; if people want 2-minute responses, why would they use a medium that most people don't checks every 2 minutes. Use the phone!
Are you really willing to say that the maximum time between sitting at your desk, walking to the toilet, taking a dump then returning to your desk is 2 minutes? Are all your company meetings 2 minutes? Do you take 2-minute lunchbreaks? Do you ever sleep, have weekends, vacations for less than 2 minutes? Do you make love within 2 minutes? Actually, don't answer that last one; this is slashdot afterall.
If you're addicted to e-mail, you're probably thinking people cannot do without your response. You're wrong.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We had a clear desk policy which was extended to email - not by force, but I was asked to get my inbox down to nothing.
Solution: Set up a folder called "Not Inbox" and a rule to automatically push all incoming email to that.
I was able to honestly say that my inbox was completely empty.
Absolutely! I went through the "Getting Things Done" class, and I am trying to use parts of it. When it comes to emptying the inbox I cheat like crazy. Company policy dictates that anything in the inbox gets automatically deleted after 30 day. So, I have a folder called "reference" when I just drop everything in my inbox after I have read them. I then use Google Desktop to search for the correct messages when needed. I have saved a TON of time.
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
I might miss out on all these job offers I am getting from all over the world. All I have to do is cash checks and I get 10% of the profits, and I only had to give them my contact info, SSN, account numbers and passwords. What suckers!
Monstar L
Money for nothing, pix for free
Yes there is, GmailUI. I'm NOT suggesting GMail. The name of this Thunderbird extension is GMailUI because it adds several GMail features to Thunderbird, including making the y key move the current email to an archive folder.
I guess you haven't met practitioners of the SuperFootnote. The trick is they only have 1 subject in the header, but as last-minute item tacked on below.
P.S. Did you see the Vista article in the Register a couple threads below this?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
- Change your workflow to read your email only at fixed intervals at fixed times during the day devoting the rest to doing work. Ensure that you are managing your time, and not email.
- Turn off instant notifications, toolbar email status, cretinberries and analogues.
- Once you have seen what gets missed when doing so create suitable notifications for the really important stuff that cannot and should not be missed. Make sure that important means only events that actually alter your schedule and not every email coming in.
- Rinse, repeat until you get yourself up to 80%+ doing scheduled work instead of interrupt driven one.
Once you have succeeded in this you have beaten your addiction. Been there, done that.Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
phone your provider and tell them to cut off you internet connection. Don't tell her. When it gets cut off freak out and phone the provider, have a big fight and at the end say "No way don't even bother I'm not dealing with you again" and then hang up. Tell your wife that she will have to go without internet until you are able to find a company that isn't a bunch of assholes. When she leaves to go to the internet cafe down the street call the lock smith, and change the locks. When she gets back make her cancle her WOW subscription and hand over her credit cards. You might have to wait her out on that one but it should work.
The 2 minute rule says that when you process your inbox (any inbox, e.g. e-mail, physical, voicemail), and the result is that you should do something (as oppsed to delegate, file for reference or just plain delete), you should do it immediately. If, on the other hand, the action will take longer than 2 minutes, you should file it in your trusted system and continue emptying your inbox.
The 2 minute rule most definitely does *not* say that you should ever be expected to answer any e-mail within 2 minutes, for exactly the reasons you list.
I thought every computer geek worth his salt knew about all about GTD by now, but from your post and the moderation of it, I see that that's not the case.
It takes me 3 minutes to figure out if something will take me less than 2 minutes to do, so I get a deadlock. The only real solution is writing post-its on a whiteboard.
As with most things, people like to nitpick the fine details as a way of criticizing the whole.
As a fairly new GTD user, I've discovered that much of GTD is meant to be used as guidelines or strategies, not divine commands from on high. The important principles of GTD are:
1) Collect all of the unfinished tasks and projects in your life ("open loops" in GTD parlance).
2) Go through that collection and decide what needs to be done with each open loop:
* Can it be done right now, in 2 minutes or less? If so, do it.
* If not, can you delegate it to someone else? If so, do so.
* If not, what's the "Next Action" (more GTD jargon) that needs to be done, either to finish it or to move it to the next step?
3) Keep track of your Next Actions in a trusted system -- notebook, PDA, text files, whatever -- so you know what needs to be done when you have time to do it.
4) Once you know what all needs to be done, you are capable of making informed decisions as to what you should be doing at any given moment. (To me, this is the most significant point of GTD.)
If you can make those principles work, the details are negotiable. If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out what needs to be done and your incoming traffic and workload permits it, set the threshold to 5 minutes. The GTD book itself usually describes seveal methods of approaching a step.
This is what drives websites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders; people are sharing things that work for them or pointing out new things that can be used to implement GTD or otherwise improve personal productivity.
(Yes, I know that parent was probably just trying to be funny. But I still wanted to throw my two cents out for people who haven't tried GTD, or tried and haven't been able to make it work.)
Jay (=
An easy way I found to use automatic rules to sort my email:
- Anything sent only to me is much more likely to be something I have been waiting for, or something I would want to respond to quickly, so I usually read these right away, even if I don't end up responding right away. Of course, I'm not one of those people who gets email from potential clients, readers, fans, etc.
- If my name is in the "To" box, but I'm not the only one, I set aside a few different times during the day to read those.
- Anything sent to a mailing list or where I'm only CCed, I only read once a day, and frequently just delete after reading the subject line.
- I ignore the "important" flag, except for people I know don't abuse it, like the system administrator who only uses it for stuff like emergency reboots.
- I don't check personal email accounts at work.
I've found this allows me to be interrupted when I want to be interrupted, but to make the interruptions minimal. Sometimes, I make specific rules for specific situations, but most of the time, these generic rules work great.This space intentionally left blank.