E-mail. A few tips.
- Ooh. Retro.
Last Thursday I sat down with my boss. He asked me when I was going to do piece of work X. I didn't know.
At that stage, I was about to go on holiday for two and a half days, then I was going to be in meetings for the best part of three days. I could only foresee doom, gloom, and misery. And when I came back from holiday, I had 90 e-mails in my "to do" list. I had another hundred in my in-box, of which I'd read 40-ish, and left them there as a reminder.
I was ruthless. Sorry, Ruth. I took an hour, and that was all it took, and I went through those 200 e-mails. I emptied my inbox. And it's stayed empty all week since then, despite three days of meetings. At the end of the week, I had an empty inbox and the space to do job X.
This is the guts of my technique.
Start with the oldest e-mail in the inbox.
If I've already dealt with it, file it.
If I can deal with it within a couple of minutes, do it, and file it.
If I need longer to do it, file it in a "pending file", and review and prioritise that.
Now all I need to do is actually do some of the work... but I feel a lot better about it.
20 February, 2005
