paper clip

if u have not already read about this somewhere, do take a peek at this story.

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

the dude started with a giant red paper clip and wanted to trade it up all the way to a house.

guess what. he did it and has his housewarming party this labor day weekend.

the inbox

i worked in my first job for a little over 5 years and was able to grow pretty fast. i feel that one thing that helped me grow was the way i handled my inbox. i have discussed my personal theory of inboxes with a few friends in the past. here it goes again. pl. do post back your comments.

rookie
the first couple of years were the initial years and i worked in a team that was completely co-located and we used to have maybe 5-10 personal face to face meetings / discussions and probably an equal number of emails.

the organization kind of expanded to a few other locations / countries and after abt 3 years, i used to get abt 20-40 emails a day. i used to read them, leave them there and over a period of a couple of years, i ended up accumulating a few hundred emails in my inbox. i took a month long vacation and came back to close to 700 emails, almost 100-200 of them unread.

brilliance
it was a boring week inbetween projects and i undertook a mini project for inbox cleaning. i deleted all the unwanted junk and sorted all other emails into folders. my inbox was empty. i started practicing an email routine that included these processing rules.

• junk emails get deleted immediately. broadcast messages are read and destroyed.
• info emails are filed in folders. (i had close to a 100 folders at the end of 5 years)
• replies are done via “reply with history” to keep a recor and such emails that have been replied have no more value and get trashed.
• emails that required a 5-10 minute work effort were attended to immediately and discarded.
• emails that need to be attended by eod are left in the inbox – unread.
• emails that require a little bit more effort, but can be attended to in the next few days are left in the inbox – read.
• emails that require a long term plan get transformed into an activity that is tracked via an issue tracking system, assigned to subordinates, go into a project plan, etc….
• email left over at the end of the day becomes the todo list for the following day / week.
• all other emails that do not fall into any of these categories either get destroyed or shoved into some remote folder and forgotten.

veteran
this system went on really well and for the past couple of years, my primary duty in my job was to respond to emails. i merged emails with wikis and started doing some additional neat stuff. here are a few.

• emails that require an answer that would make sense to a group were never replied to directly.
• the question and answer was morphed and posted on to the team wiki appropriately namespaced and indexed. a broadcast message was then sent with a link to the wiki.
• with google desktop search and the lotus notes plugin, finding any email never took more than a minute.

today
the reason, emails came to my mind is this very interesting article on slashdot about inboxes. of course, i fall into the “deleters” category. i think i became an “extreme deleter” and it kind of scares me.

• lotus notes had a bug displaying unread count properly and always showed an empty inbox having 17 unread emails. it used to just piss me off.
• after having used lotus notes for 5+ years moving to outlook was sorta wierd. outlook does not force you to empty deleted items and deleting unread emails in outlooks keeps the email unread in the deleted folder. i started doing a shift delete to wipe it off clean, but still it pissed me off for a few days.
• i never used to leave an email unanswered for more than 6 hours any day of the week.

reading this article makes me realize that i need to change. my new team in my new job is co-located and i do not think i will be going back to the 100 emails / day state anytime soon. it should bring back sanity soon.
email management did help me be a bit successful with my work. you sure should give it a try. i am sure it would help. just don’t take it to the extreme.