It’s difficult to deal with conversational e-mail from outsiders, what I usually do is set it aside and deal with it during the two periods during the day when I return phone calls, then call the person. Extended conversational e-mail is less efficient than talking on the phone & I’ll just deal with it then.

Insider conversational e-mail is easier to deal with by agreeing on rules about communication within the team: conversational type e-mail doesn’t belong in e-mail, it belongs in the internal IM system. Our IM system gives users the chance to describe themselves as busy, sleeping, offline, etc. & if the IM system shows they’re not available, then leave a voice mail or send the e-mail. Nonconversational e-mail & transmitting documents, schedules, etc., belong in e-mail.

For my partner and I anyway. I think the real key to this rests in Merlin’s post where he talks about setting agreed-upon standards for team.

My team uses Gmail and we seem to have a kind of natural escalation where we will first use the embedded chat feature to IM each other items or requests of an ephemeral, momentary nature.

If we’re having an IM conversation and it gets too complex after a couple minutes we’ll either call on the phone, or set an appointment to talk it through on the phone.

If the request is something not super time critical or if the person is not online, we usually defer to email.

For group conversations and mailing lists, I filter them out of my inbox to a ‘mailing lists’ label and then skim through it each day, opening and reading the ones I’m interested in.

One problem I have with these longer discussions is that the entire conversation is bottom posted again and again. I think chairman Gruber has it right with the bottom posting and only quoting the portions of the original email that you want to refer to.

In addition, for longer group conversations, I think email is no longer the best tool. The team message board on the company intranet fits the bill better.

Yesterday, I finally watched the infamous “inbox zero” video. Through the whole thing I kept thinking “Wow, this is great, but I can never use it in my job…”

This morning I did my very best to fit the strategy into my work flow. I printed the slide “Delete, Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do” and stuck it on my cubicle wall next to my CRT. But I’m still troubled by the notion that I “have” to get to zero.

I’m in a project management position, where I’m usually managing between 3 and 5 projects concurrently. I finally realized I can categorize email in Outlook, and have now setup search folders for each project.

I tried going to “zero” in the past, but found I lost track of ongoing conversations related to each project, such as approval processes for money, and other decisions. For me, getting to “zero” doesn’t make sense. Instead I have search folders setup in my archive as well, and have all messages older than two weeks automatically archived. Two weeks seems to be the timeframe in which most conversations wrap up for me, so it works. I can quickly refer back to recent conversation when I decide to delegate, respond, defer, or do, and unfortunately I seldom delete.

I guess I’m sort of orbiting about “zero”

I think the clarification on the need for email conversations is so much easier if the people above (i.e. management) are the ones who are modeling when to cut off the email and move to face to face meetings. That might seem too obvious, however I find that often managers don’t know how much power they wield in that area.

One great in-house rule is simply when we get past X number of emails/replies on a topic it is time to move face to face. It takes a little policing, but it catches on. Of course I also find that a lot of times if I am first to suggest face to face, more often than not it kills the conversation and saves my inbox sanity.

As a recent convert to the “Inbox Zero” (My term: “In=0”) approach as an offshoot of my GTD system, I’m not sure I follow how In=0 is “too” anything to not work for specific given profession.

Some background: I’m involved with two businesses, one is running a software company and the second is photography related. For both of my “identities”, In=0 works well.

My approach is to have @Action folders for each of my businesses (one set for each) and an archive folder for each of the businesses on my Mac PowerBook, along with using Daylite for GTD. The conversations that I have in each of my lives are not very similar, but neither seems more, or less suited to In=0.

The only difference between leaving your Inbox filled with email and it being “classified” in to an Action folder is where (or how) you’ll look to find something. As a user of both Mac and Windows in my office, I’ve found that I can search easily and find past threads, messages, etc.

Backing up what other posters have said, there are times where I think email becomes counter-productive to forward progress and breaking off the thread to phone or “person-to-person” mode seems most appropriate. My experience is that IM also nicely reduces inbound email flow, thus, effectively handles some issues more quickly.

Doug

Conversation implies dialogue and email is not that. Email is back and forth monologues. Email is about the worse tool there is for coming to an agreement, but it is great for ‘documenting’ and communicating what has already been agreed. People say things in email they’d never say in person, and that is almost always a bad thing. I hate to judge, but most people that prefer to deal with their colleagues through email and IM are using technology to hide poor social skills. When you’re hiring techies, keep in mind that its much easier to improve people’s technical skills than it is to improve their social skills.

Darrel, you’re spot on. The most important thing that managers can do is create culture…

Len

It took a while for my team & co-workers to get their head around the fact that I would be checking email only 2x/day and it wound up working great for them and me. But when it came to dealing with ongoing threads/topics, folks were either (or both) to lazy to abide to requested standards or would put off responding until long after their moment of opportunity passed.

Adopting a method of moving these long threads to a Basecamp-style topic management system would have been ideal. In addition to seeing the latest comments, those archives would always be there, saving us all the time to search/sort through the old emails.

So, maybe it’s possible that the preference for email over other means of communication is handy specifically because it provides a buffer? Hadn’t thought of it that way.

I wonder if folks here can share more specifics on how their work culture helps people know when to escalate beyond email? Is there a role for coordinators, managers, or leads to intervene on long threads? Or do these things tend to just find their own level?

I’m not sure I’d call my system a preference for e-mail as much as a recognition that some things work better as e-mail, some as IMs and some things people should just pick up the phone or walk down the hall. Every tool deserves a place in the tool box, so long as the tool accomplishes a discretely identifiable task.

I’m definitely trying to get people used to the idea that I may only answer e-mails during two periods a day, but that if they have something quick, I’m available via IM. The issue really revolves around that I need some uninterrupted/uninterruptible chunks of time during the day or I feel like I have ADD, bouncing from issue to issue. Also, to a certain extent, I find that the people who work for me will, if I’m available, use asking me something as a substitute for thinking (this I’ve learned after years of being instantly available and then wondering why the people working for me don’t seem to be developing critical thinking skills).

And anything that involves an extended back and forth, whether internal or external, is more efficiently handled via phone or meeting - even if it’s deeply technical.

I’m not sure I buy into the idea that people who communicate substantially through e-mail or IM are socially inept - to some extent it’s a recognition that if my time is worth say $300 an hour, I need to save the social backslapping for a time when the firm is getting that value out of it. If someone wants to ask me whether I’d like a report spiral bound or book bound, I’d rather deal with it via IM and not pretend like we’re having a meaningful conversation. If I spent two hours on a conference call with a client yesterday and he wants to let me know he just overnighted me the documents we discussed, he and I are probably better served if he e-mails me rather than calls.

I think the distinction between conversational emails and other emails is a fascinating one.

The single best tip I have for handling a high volume of email — whether conversational or informational — is to establish the use of “no reply necessary” or “NRN” at your office and among your regular correspondents, and to use it rigorously yourself.

If everyone agrees not to respond by email to any email marked NRN, it can dramatically cut down on the volume. Part of the problem with the way people use email is that people rarely make it clear whether they expect you to respond or not, and you wind up wasting time trying to figure out the right answer to that question. And you can do a huge favor to the people you are writing by letting them know when you don’t expect a reply. That also saves you getting an email back from them to which you then wonder whether you need to reply. And so on!

Of course, if you violently disagree with something or have a key piece of information, you can and should ignore the NRN.

Let me start by saying that I’m as aware as anyone of the pitfalls of thinking more technology can help solve these kinds of problems, but in this case I am convinced that it can, at least for me. The problem, in short, is that once I’ve deleted/archived/whatever a message to get my inbox to zero, I can’t get back to that message from future messages in the same thread.

All emails are conversational to some degree; it isn’t uncommon for me to get a reply from someone that drops enough original context for me to understand it… or maybe, to follow up, I’ll need a link that was in an earlier message (or, for those of you who like the “business-style” top-posting idiom where every message contains the entire foregoing conversation, an attachment). So there’s a strong disincentive to delete messages from my inbox. My ideal client would archive messages when I hit delete, but would allow me to pull up an entire thread and/or nearby messages in the same thread as any message, no matter where the other messages have been filed (I’d like to extend this to threads that move to/from email, mailing lists, and newsgroups, but let’s not get greedy — yet).

The closest I ever got to this was by using Gnus (an emacs mail/news mode). I had it set up to normally show only unread or flagged messages, and throw read, unflagged messages out of my inbox after a few months. Gnus has this great feature that allows me to step backwards in a thread, showing earlier messages, and to display a whole thread… as long as all the messages are in the same mailbox.

But Gnus, for various reasons, causes as much pain as it saves, and I need to use other clients from time to time, which means that I confront thousands of messages when I use some other clients (iPhone in particular has no filtered views). So now I’m trying to get to Inbox Zero and living with the frustration of not being able to easily go back in time when I need to.

Obviously I’m not the only person thinking this way: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229568

I’m an aerospace engineer-turned-project manager, and for whatever reason, the NASA/contractor community is like this and wants to trade a crapload of emails. [I think it’s because no one ever takes good notes in meetings and few are good with followup action items unless we have someone taking them down, but that’s a discussion point for anotehr day.] So yeah, I get a lot of email, and much of it is discussion.

I’ve learned to adapt an I0 approach; rather than my methodology for personal email, which is sorted to Actions, Archives, and Responses, I have per-project folders for my work email. Admittedly, this is a relic of my pre-GTD days, but I also find that searching is a bit easier when I’ve already sifted the buckets a bit, since I’m seeing 100-200 emails a day coming my way. I generally keep my INBOX to a minimum, and I keep Outlook [I know, I know] up and running [I KNOW] at all times. Being a PM in my organization means being a human inforouter, and I delegate a lot of things that I can’t answer immediately.

On my good days, I have a handful of emails left in my INBOX at the end of the day; when I’m being really good, I put those into Actions to start my day off right in my own personal task-management system [Alex King’s TasksPro] and file the email so I’m staring at a tabula rasa the next morning. [Okay, that’s a lie … I’m staring at the 30 emails that came in between when I left work and when I got at my desk that morning.] Helps me manage it.

…at least in the sense that I don’t file them until the conversation is finished. Threading is a great help also. After they are done, I file them into their respective folder for later reference. So, for me, Inbox Zero works, but some .5s always remain.

It took some time for me to find a good workflow to manage email, but finally I got it. The main issue I encountered was on the conversations: because of my job, I need to be informed of a lot of things, and email conversation can go on for more than one week. Although it is easy to decide if a message is actionable, must be kept for reference or can be deleted, the problem is timing, especially for the third category: many messages are important now, and must be kept for reference, but they will be meaningless in some time. True, I could simply archive those messages with the others, the disk space is not an issue today, but there is always that bad feeling of useless stuff growing for no reasons.

For me the solution is to have an additional category, a buffer if you want, that I know will be deleted in some time. At last my Inbox is always empty at the end of the day. All the messages go to a single archive folder, some tagged as “removein5weeks”; all actionable items go to the GTD application immediately, so there is no need to keep them in the Inbox. During the weekly review, I open a smart folder which shows all the messages tagged “removein5weeks” and which have been in the system for more than five weeks, and I delete everything. The five weeks frame works for me, but it could be different.

I am a Mac user, and I have implemented the workflow using Mail.app, MailTags, and MailActOn. When I process my Inbox I have three shortcuts:

• Send the message to the GTD application (OmniFocus for me);
• Move the message to the archive folder, for reference;
• Move the message to the archive folder, AND add the tag “removein5weeks”.

For the first time I know that my email program only contains new messages, things that I could search in the future, and nothing more. No more bad feelings looking at the thousands of messages stacked in the Inbox, no more fear of forgetting the only important message in there, because I didn’t act immediately on it.