Open Thread: How Much Email?
It almost seems like there are fashions in email. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about handling email stress or even resorting to the nuclear option of email bankruptcy. Most of our fascination with email (and ways to handle it) seems to be driven by the common perception that we’re drowning under an avalanche of the stuff. Indeed, in some circles it’s fashionable to boast about the size of one’s inbox or the number of hundreds of messages that one gets per day.
And yet, on the other side of the coin we read about people recommending doing without email entirely for critical communication. And more and more prominent digerati are writing about email reduction techniques. Perhaps having the biggest inbox is no longer the passport to geek street cred that it once was.
So, where do you stand, members of the web working community? Do you plow through hundreds of emails every day, constantly fighting the good fight to stay on top of things? Or have you ruthlessly eliminated chatter to get your stream down to a scant handful of quality items that you can actually deal with? How much email do you need these days to get the job done right?
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I work on the Web team for a large Association and I go through 70-80 emails a day that are actual work. Add another 15-20 for interoffice jokes, comments, tirades, etc. Spam has been eliminated from my Inbox but I still check the Spam folder a few times a day to make sure external vendor emails haven’t been swept in. It helps that I don’t give my work email address out to friends or relatives. I know plenty of people who get a lot of personal email at work and include that in their “totals.”
I could be just as productive with much less email. Probably half of what I get. Sometimes this means not using email to ask simple questions of others in the office, which often leads to a 3-4 email thread. I just walk over and ask, sometimes with a notebook in hand. The less you send sometimes means the less you get.
Najlepsze wózki dziecięce oraz foteliki samochodowe – zapraszamy!
How ironic that you bring up this topic…
About a week ago I ruthlessly eliminated the useless chatter… I permanently deleted some email addresses (that I had given out to family members or had been picked up somehow by spammers) and added some new ones in an attempt to save some time from going through a ton of emails every day in order to find the necessary ones.
I think it’s imperative to keep your email addresses as clean and free of useless chatter when working online. It’s just too easy to get distracted…
I still receive industry newsletters and emails form family and all that other “chatter”, I just don’t send it through to my Outlook In Box anymore. I just access it via webmail at the end of my day when all the important stuff is already out of the way.
Thank God for Gmail filters. Using them, I have been able to send persistent irritant emailers straight to trash and all other non-essentials to bypass the inbox entirely and sit in a label until I have time to look at it. That and the elimination of the email notification device means that I am rarely interrupted by email anymore and I only check my inbox twice a day (sometimes three times).
My email load is actually not too terrible (thanks to effective spam filters). I also maintain a separate email address for my writing business, my family, and for each of my blogs. I even have a dedicated “junk” email that I use to subscribe to things, enter contests, and so on.
The “junk” email accounts for most of the messages I receive — but they are also always the least important messages that I receive. I review it a couple times a week and delete what I don’t need. The business and blog email addresses I check several times a day. I check the family one once a day.
On top of spam filtering that others have already mentioned, a few months ago I slowly started changing every online shopping account I have to send messages to a different email address than the one I use for work. That made a pretty huge difference just separating those two worlds.
Then, I started getting into GTD (my review and early usage experience).
Today was a pretty average work Wednesday and I just checked what my load was:
69 messages received with which I did one of the following:
o Deleted (42 of them) either because I responded immediately or it wasn’t relevant
o Archived (17 of them, in 6 different subfolders) because it was FYI only for me
o Put on my Actions list (2 of them), meaning stuff I didn’t respond to right away
o Responded and am waiting for responses (8 of them)
Somewhere between new messages, the deleted, and the responded/waiting, I sent out 32 emails today for work. I’m not sure how that might compare with others, but that’s a pretty normal load for me. 69 in, 32 out, 101 total.
Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal blog: http://nerdguru.net
“Email is dead” Email is dead is a theme I cover from time to time in my blog JustEnoughTechnology. I’m interested in it because email is an example of technology pretending to be communication. It is a useful way of one way information transfer without the overheads of writing and posting a letter. However the usual umltithreaded cc,bcc FYI inter-office memo is a symptom of a hive bulging with drones rather than workers
email has become a liability, and we need organisations to adopt better practives (enterprise 2.0) if you will, so:
social bookmarking (enterprise or del.icio.us) to cut down the “hey check this link” mails
IM for production (it has history, can run on an enterprise server too)
social network/intranet (induction, exchanging jokes etc, bringing all above together)
email has become a valuable communicate tool for us which makes the job of setting junk aside from real leads and customer emails absolutely essential. We get up to 300 emails a day and thankfully, using Gmail we are able to create enough filters and labels so all the emails come in to the right people at the right time, though the 3GB mail box is getting crowded ;)
We might sometimes feel important if we get a ton of e-mmail.
Whether these e-mails are useful or not is another matter.
When the topic of the e-mail is of no interest to me, I delete it without opening it.
To follow the thread of a conversation and avoid repetition wikis might be better.
When my communication is blog related I often comment on the page of the person or company I mentioned.
I learned quite a few things on how to manage the ‘digital flood’ by reading ‘Bit Literacy’ which I mentioned in How to cut the information overload down to size?
My 3 cents
Serge