How to deal with massive amounts of e-Mail (CISV-Hacks)
How to you deal with e-mails? I've hinted at this concept before, but now I want to elaborate on this issue: The more people are involved in CISV, the more you are spammed (in the original sense!) with CISV e-mails. When I was still NJR and in the IPP taskforce I was already one step away from e-mail bankruptcy: I was on at least 8 different e-mail lists, not to forget e-mails I received from work, friends, university etc. I easily received about 25 e-mails a day, in 2002. At that time I already found an article on the web that said something like, you should always remove all e-mails from your Inbox and put them where they belong: Archived, in the calendar, on the to-do-list, etc., which I tried to apply. Meanwhile, with the invention of Gmail handling big amounts of e-mails has become a lot easier, but still remains a challenge.
Today I found this presentation by Merlin Man, who spends a whole (worthwhile!!!) half an hour on explaining how to achieve emptying your e-mail inbox.
I'm pretty sure, the following 30 minutes (the rest is discussion, also a goodie!) are easily saved in your future time dealing with e-mail:
I especially like his analogy to a person working in a deli, that keeps checking orders, instead of processing them. I also know a lot of people that are addicted to sorting their e-mail into folders using crazy taxonomy the way Merlin describes.
So, for the last two weeks, I've been trying to get all e-Mails down to zero by using the delete/archive-defer-delegate-do-respond-system. My aim is to organize my life more through my calendar and to-do-list. I've also disabled a program that pops up a window, anytime a new e-mail arrives. So far it feels liberating: What do I want to do next instead of which of all these e-mails needs my attention right now?
Merlin Man, by the way, is also working on a book, and everything about Inbox Zero can be found on this website.
The funny thing is that while I was trying to divert my attention away from my e-mail inbox, Google introduced Buzz and also integrated the Calendar into the e-mail page - it's if they are trying to suck me back into my inbox!
Sidenote: Other challenges in the age of electronic management are "desktop zero" and "RSS feed zero".
How to you deal with e-mails? I've hinted at this concept before, but now I want to elaborate on this issue: The more people are involved in CISV, the more you are spammed (in the original sense!) with CISV e-mails. When I was still NJR and in the IPP taskforce I was already one step away from e-mail bankruptcy: I was on at least 8 different e-mail lists, not to forget e-mails I received from work, friends, university etc. I easily received about 25 e-mails a day, in 2002. At that time I already found an article on the web that said something like, you should always remove all e-mails from your Inbox and put them where they belong: Archived, in the calendar, on the to-do-list, etc., which I tried to apply. Meanwhile, with the invention of Gmail handling big amounts of e-mails has become a lot easier, but still remains a challenge.
Today I found this presentation by Merlin Man, who spends a whole (worthwhile!!!) half an hour on explaining how to achieve emptying your e-mail inbox.
A lot of people right now are, for practical purposes, living in their Inbox. They leave their e-mail open all day long, it's auto-checking through out the day. Little bleebs come up, about every minute. An E-mail becomes the access for everything they do with work
They use it as a to-do-list manager, they use it as their calendar [...] scroll through their inbox, to decide what meetings they have to go today.
I'm pretty sure, the following 30 minutes (the rest is discussion, also a goodie!) are easily saved in your future time dealing with e-mail:
I especially like his analogy to a person working in a deli, that keeps checking orders, instead of processing them. I also know a lot of people that are addicted to sorting their e-mail into folders using crazy taxonomy the way Merlin describes.
So, for the last two weeks, I've been trying to get all e-Mails down to zero by using the delete/archive-defer-delegate-do-respond-system. My aim is to organize my life more through my calendar and to-do-list. I've also disabled a program that pops up a window, anytime a new e-mail arrives. So far it feels liberating: What do I want to do next instead of which of all these e-mails needs my attention right now?
Merlin Man, by the way, is also working on a book, and everything about Inbox Zero can be found on this website.
The funny thing is that while I was trying to divert my attention away from my e-mail inbox, Google introduced Buzz and also integrated the Calendar into the e-mail page - it's if they are trying to suck me back into my inbox!
Sidenote: Other challenges in the age of electronic management are "desktop zero" and "RSS feed zero".
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