Auto check for me is fine - Just turning off the sound and bounce in Mail and NewsFireRSS works in lowering the threshold for interuptions.

I also make sure that the dock is hidden - that way the red flag of a new message is off the screen and thus I the urge to check for new mail is reduced to only when I want to and not when I’m ‘told’ to.

Oh and I never have chat apps running during the working day - yikes - at least with email I have the choice to ignore it… with a friend wanting to yak there is no getting out of it.

number 1 and number 4 changed my life. I check my email when I feel like it. I’m a professor and — umm — I repeat myself professionally. If I get one emailed question I get three more, and it’s easy to build templates after that.

You missed the most important one.

If you have difficulty in saying it in an email, pickup the phone or stroll over to the person and just talk to them.

Cuts down on more emails flying back and forth due to your problem in explaining something in an email.

Anyone know of a Windows equivalent of MailTemplate?

just wanted to ask that question as well Marc, there seems to be a steady influx of Windows based GTD-ers here Merlin!

The NY Times article was pretty good. But the reporter apparently wrote it after reading a similar, more in-depth article on Mark Taw’s blog: http://marktaw.com/blog/GettingBackToWork.html

H

MrLithic:

That’s absolutely right. Sometimes it seems like people forget that the point of email is to communicate. Esp. on tech-ier projects I’ve seen ridiculously long and talmudic threads that could have been settled with one call or a chat over coffee.

H:

I have no way of knowing what that reporter has read, but, yeah, I enjoyed Mark’s article very much. :)

On point #1: I find it’s more productive to automatically check email, because otherwise I can use it as a procrastination device. Just as rss lets me stop refreshing webpages all day, automatic mail checking allows me to kill the dang check email reflex.

Having it set to at least 20 minutes is a must though. I thought ISPs get mad if you set it any lower anyway. :-)

Allowing a maximum # of e-mails to sit in the inbox at any one time. When I have over 100, I go through the stack and eleminate some of them.

Windows people, if you are using Outlook: I use email signatures to fill in little blocks of common text.

Just give the signature a good name, and don’t set a default. Then your text is available as a dropdown from the signature button.

For longer ones, I keep a Word document with some boilerplate that I can tweak as necessary.

I’m the web manager for a college, and I am the triage point for our site’s main contact form. This really saves me time, which means I can pay more attention to either internal emails, or those external emails that are really unique!

Great hack, Elaine!

Great article. Does anyone know of an application for Eudora for Mac that does something similar to MailTemplate?

You already have it, Laura. :-)

Stationery, baby!

Ooo, I think I’m gonna disagree a bit on the “don’t forget that you can always just go over and talk to the person” thing. Email history can provide a nice record of what’s already been discussed and decided. GMail, for example, is based around the whole notion of “save everything, you might need to search for it later.” By walking over and talking to somebody you’ve substantially lessened the value in consulting your email history when you need to confirm something. If you do walk over to talk to somebody, and a decision gets made, you’d probably be better off following up the original email thread with the results of your discussion just so that everybody really is on the same page going forward.

As someone that works remotely for a telcom company I find that 2-5 are very useful. I have mail checking set to every minute, but there are no audible indicators. This way if I’m doing mundane tasks I can keep in contact with my group. But I can ignore the mail if there are more important issues.

Also I’ve found that spending the time to make a filter for every message possible is invaluable. I make sure the only things that come in the inbox are what I need to take care of right away. And Duane is right about saving everything and using it for reference later.

I took the “Get Mail” button out of my mail.app toolbar to prevent me from hitting it over and over. Now I’m forced to wait for the program to automatically check every X minutes.

Merlin, thanks! I’ve been using Eudora for years and had never run across the Stationery function.

Re email as a CYA/record - there’s nothing wrong with having an irl or phone conversation to clarify a touchy issue, then sending an email followup that states “here’s what we talked about, here’s what we agreed to do.” I’ve used this strategy successfully on several occasions.

With regard to number 3, I’ve read that the size of your medium often dictates how much you are expected to write. This is part of the reason why Moleskines are so popular; you only require yourself to write in 5x8 chunks instead of 8.5x11.

That said, a good way to keep yourself from writing e-mails that are too long is to shrink the size of your reply window. I just tested Thunderbird on OSX and it will remember your message window size, so I would think other popular e-mail clients do the same.

(Without this sentence, for example, this comment fit perfectly in the text box without scrolling.)

There has been a longer (albeit more tech-oriented) story on the same at http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030308-tyrannyofemail.html.

The only thing I’d add is - particularly for Outlook/ Thunderbird users - set up message rules.

All my relevant email (doing development work for 12 companies etc., blah, blah) means that a seperate folder for each company is perfect. The message rules sort based on sender/domain and push it to the relevant folder. That way I can quickly/easily see if there’s any big issues (say 10 emails from one client in an hour) and deal with them proactively.

And if it’s sat in the inbox still, well obviously it’s so “relevant” that I haven’t even set up a rule for it. cough

“Stop trying to be Victor Hugo”: You couldn’t have chosen a worse example. Victor Hugo perfectly understood the value of brief communication as is illustrated by the following well known anecdote: When Les Miserables was published Hugo wanted to know how book sales were going, so he sent his publisher a telegram containing one letter “?” The publisher answered in the same style “!”

Brevity at its very best.

Details on the anecdore here: http://members.aol.com/cpntresan/hugo.html

Stop trying to be Victor Hugo

Well taken, Dee, and thanks for that anecdote.

I was referring more to raw page tonnage, but, yeah, good point. :)

Yeah, I get it. I just found it amusing that your example of verbosity happened to strike this particular anecdote.

One thing that has helped me with #1 and #3 is to use my email program’s “flag message” option. If something’s going to require a detailed response or some sort of action on my part, I flag it, close it, and go on to the next message. Later, when I have time, I can sort all messages in my inbox by flags and see what I have to do.

Good common sense tips. Been doing all but #4 for years. For a bit more advanced discussion of dealing with email, take a look at this:

http://www.goodexperience.com/reports/e-mail/email-report-goodexperience.pdf

does anyone know how to turn off auto-check in Outlook for windows running off a corporate Exchange server?

sol, this is not ms tech support. ;)

Great tips. I couldn’t agree more.

I also agree with Lyle about using message rules. They help a lot.

The same tip for Entourage regarding using Signatures for templates works pretty well in Mac OS X’s Mail.app. If you want to use more than one snippet tho: select the first signature (shift-tab, down arrowing, return, tab) and then copy your current message (Command-A, Command-X) and go back and select another sig/snipet (shift-tab, down-arrowing, return, tab) followed by a well placed Command-v.

Oh—and you are, of course, using MailEnhancer to autoselect a signature for your mail account, right?

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13292

I put 21 minutes in autocheck email instead of 20 so my requests would ROTATE around the clock. 21-42-03-24-45min …. Because when I put a multiple of then like a lot of people do often I found that the server was kind of flodded with a lot requests at the same time with poor response time. With 21 minutes it is just a smoother ride.