Email meltdown
To the left is what I would call an email nightmare. Thankfully, the nightmare is not mine. It’s what I saw when I was working with Stef Lewandowski on the I So Wish website last week.
I looked over his shoulder, and there on his laptop was my version of hell.
I expressed my concern at the time – I mean, how do you live like that?
An inbox with 28478 items in it… 14514 of which are unread. That represents so much stress, so many unfinished bits of business, and – worse – so much just having no idea where everything is up to, project wise.
This would quite literally drive me nuts. And, it seems, it drives some people who have sent Stef email nuts too. Stef is one of the most creative, active, productive and reliable people I’ve met – but it’s not surprising that occasionally the wheels fall off when there’s a communication vortex like that.
He’s blogged about the problem.
So… I’ve offered to help out.
The Dubber Method
I plan to work more with Stef, because he does great stuff, and we make a really good team. But if that’s going to work, I need for him to see and deal with messages I send him. So I’m going to introduce him to what is becoming jokingly known at work as ‘The Dubber Method’ (actually, it’s combination of a few other people’s methods – and David Allen gets by far the most credit for this).
I know people who can be reasonably happy when they only have a page or two of email in their system. I’m entirely email intolerant. I happily receive and send it – but I will not leave it in the inbox. Ever.
To the right, for comparison, is my own email inbox. There’s a zen-like calm that descends upon me whenever I see that zero state.
Of course, it’s not always like that – and I get a lot of email as you might imagine – but it’s like that at least twice a day.
It’s taken me a while to get there, and I’ve learned a lot of tips and tricks from all sorts of places in order to make that happen – but it has got to the point where it’s something I’m becoming known for. I end each day with an empty inbox – and to some people, that seems like a magic trick.
Productive laziness
I’m not just deleting everything and shirking responsibility. I’m very lazy (which is what motivates me to get a lot done with as little actual time and effort as possible), but I’m not quite that lazy.
I wrote a book in a day last week because I didn’t want to spend more than a day on it… but I’m not just going to decide to ignore things that are important along the way. In fact, not getting stuff handled tends to happen because the messages are falling through the cracks – and that only really happens if you’ve got so much in your inbox, you miss stuff.
And I’m not big on having people hassle me about something they sent me ages ago. Unnecessary stress, if you ask me. So I found a perfectly lazy way of dealing with it, that made sure I didn’t have to bother with that kind of nonsense – but still get all the stuff I want to do done.
Mine is a very simple way of working, and so much less can go wrong – but to some people it seems an impossible miracle and their idea of a dream come true.
So I’ve started teaching people how to get there and stay there – and this week, my aim is to fix Stef’s email: the Mt Everest of inbox overflow.
Wish me luck.
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