Email

The High Cost of Pretending

Merlin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:39:50 -0500

apophenia: Warning: Email Sabbatical is Imminent .. and other random thoughts

danah boyd is finishing her dissertation, then going on vacation for a month. While, she's gone, she's not accepting email. At all. Got that?

No apology. No "vacation message" to pretend she'll read it later. And no implied promise that the stuff people send to her will magically be tended to by an invisble army of interns and elves. While she's away, every message she receives is simply discarded with a friendly response as to why. danah writes:

...I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I've trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to /dev/null. The effect is very simple. You cannot put anything in my queue while I'm away (however lovingly you intend it) and I come home to a clean INBOX. Don't worry... if you forget, you'll get a nice note from my INBOX telling you to shove off, respect danah's deeply needed vacation time, and try again after January 19.

If you roll your eyes at such fancy, uppity, big-city behavior, consider the alternatives most of us suffer in order to pretend we're listening. Even when we know we're not.

At worst, we lie: both to ourselves and to others.

We play this pantomime game where we continue to offer contemporary life's default level of extraordinary personal access to anyone who seeks it -- even at the times when we have no intention of, or ability to, do anything about what people use that access to ask of us. And, that's a small but telling lie.

You ever done the opposite of what danah is doing? Where you come back from a vacation during which you half-checked email from a mobile device, ignored most of it, and didn't properly finish processing the rest? Sure, you have. And, what happened?

Well, if you're like most people, you deleted a lot of the messages without even reading them. Right? Or, what? You spent 2 or 3 days reading and responding to everything? Even while new (and inarguably more salient) stuff piled up? Right. Smart.

So, maybe you prefer to think of it as mismanaging expectations. Because you feel guilty about just ignoring everything you implied you'd do something about, and you still feel the pressure to do something with all of it -- even if it's just responding with a template or writing back to say how busy you are, and, Sorry! but I'm still getting to this. SORRY!

Or. You could have told the truth. Don't send me email. I won't see it. Write me later.

danah's decision would be so wrong for so many people that it's mind-boggling to contemplate. But it is her decision, and doing anything but congratulating her on having the courageousness to unambiguously manage such a giant expectation would be cynical and (yep) dishonest. This is some bold shit, and, you know what? That scares the hell out of people.

In my experience, most of us are terrified of being told the truth, even about something as seemingly trivial as email. It's so much easier and more comfortable for all the parties in a relationship to fall back on the pseudo-polite non-communication that lets us pretend to pay attention to each other on a massive scale. And, right now, this is a really important thing that very few people are talking about.

Even if we call this something less than "a lie," we're still stuck with the depressing prospect of a secret and shameful existence in which pretending to pay attention to people is less damaging than simply admitting we don't have the cycles to be a big phony. That pretending is a more important use of your time than doing things. That anyone who pretends to pay attention to each of us is entitled to the same nonsense courtesy.

Stress comes from dissonance. When two things in your mind can't be resolved and you start thinking you're going to be stuck with the incongruity forever, you stress.

But, as much as our minds and our hearts encourage us to believe the fault goes to our will or our lack of industry -- rather than our thinking and cognition -- the true cure for stress is to cut the Gordian Knot. To change your mind about at least one thing you think you're not allowed to change your mind about.

You alter the game when you re-write the rules. And, in this instance, if you find yourself more occupied with maintaining the lie than you are with doing the real work that the lie's meant to support, it's probably time to drop the lie. And, it also wouldn't hurt to get unbelievably real about what you really do, rather than how and when you move bits.

Thing is, it's not kindness that makes you see honesty as a dick move; it's fear. And whenever you let fear drive, you're going to end up in some dark, weird places where email ends up seeming like the least of your problems.

No, we can't all turn off the inputs in our life whenever we want. But we can damned sure do the more significant thing danah did here. We can create meaningful and sustainable expectations about how, when, or whether we'll respond to each of the inputs in our world. We can be candid about the level of attention strangers and friends can expect from us. And, when the time is appropriate, we can find the stomach to tell the world we're not even pretending to listen.

”The High Cost of Pretending” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 09, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts

Merlin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:46:17 -0400

Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail's unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic.

Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple's MobileMe problems, I'm not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies you can choose to employ whenever a change in access to anything unexpectedly rearranges your day. Because things do break, and there's no reason you have to break with them.

One of the things that's most helpful about a system like GTD is the way you learn to think of your work as something that can and should be viewed from multiple angles.

A 90-second GTD primer:

Project. Any desirable outcome that requires more than one physical action in order to be considered complete.
- "Present a persuasive pitch to Henderson's group on 2008-10-03" is a Project.
Next Action. The next physical activity I could perform that moves a Project nearer to the outcome I want.
- "Call Henderson to schedule time and location for 10/3 presentation" is the next action for my Project.
Context. Any limitation, opportunity, tool, or resource that lets me do one of the physical actions in my Project.
- "@calls" is the Context for my Next Action
- in this case, "@calls" serves as a list of all items I could do on any Project, so long as I have access to a phone.
- (See? Different angle.)
The Four Criteria Model. The notion that Priority is only one of four criteria in deciding what to do at a given moment.
- The other three are "Time Available," "Energy Available," and (you guessed it) "Context."

Got it? Contexts are a way to horizontally slice across all of your Projects in a way that lets you do what you can do at a given moment -- even if it's not the thing you want to do or most need to do. Because that's life. And, sometimes, life is a huge dick.

Like a famous religion and a handy bit of Psychology, Getting Things Done acknowledges that, while you have little or no control over the interruptions and unexpected change in your life, you DO have the power to decide what you want to do about it right now. So, while you can't run your life by Priority alone, you always have plenty to do. If you've learned to think in terms of Contexts. Get it?

So if you forgot your phone, skip "@calls," and move to anything else. Boss out to lunch? Skip "@Boss," and move to anything else. Internet went down? Skip "@web, "and move to anything else. Gmail is down? Yes! You've already guessed it! Skip "@email" and move to anything else. Anything else. Anything. Else.

Sure it's insanely frustrating and annoying to not have access to something you depend on. And, yes, it's natural to whine about it and even burn a few cycles on a fast, cathartic tantrum. But, friends, if you're so mad about an uncontrollable change in your life that it takes you off all your work for half a day, then you're still playing in the minor leagues of GTD. And you're not doing yourselves and the people you produce work for any favor in the bargain.

Plan in Projects, work in Contexts, and strive to not let anything stick to you more than you'd like it to.

And, seriously. Guys. When one door closes, just open a freaking window. An hour without email is a great time to dive into sixty guilt-free minutes of writing, reading, or even pencil-sharpening. Work the time.

Because it ends up being a lot more fun and useful to ride the wave than to yell obscenities at it for four hours.

”Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 12, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: One Clear Line

Merlin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:10:45 -0400

This article is Part 3 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Then: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have

Could an email recluse like Neal Stephenson just cowboy up by agreeing to a monthly chat session or the occasional visit to a fan forum? Sure, he could. Could a volunteer intern scan Neal’s email once a week for particularly wonderful notes? You bet. Could he even conceivably just drop all the blast shields, open a chat room, “livestream” from his desk, and then spend the rest of his life answering questions from people with nothing better to do? Maybe. Sure. But, probably not. He’s already told us as much, hasn’t he?

The point, from my perspective, is that Stephenson possesses the man-sized pant stones to declare precisely what the people who enjoy his work should expect from him. And, in so doing, he has drawn a clear line that some might find hard to love, but that is very easy to see, understand, and respect. No, he didn’t hire someone to answer his email, or get a kid to pretend to be him on Twitter, or install a Greasemonkey script that “autopokes” people on Facebook (I’ll leave you to guess which two of these I do).

Neal Stephenson essentially said, “Listen, gang, here’s what I’m going to make for you: novels.” And then, he went back to typing. To working. On work.

Get Ready for the First World

No, sir, no one that I know (including me, of course) could ever get away with such an ambitious opossum routine when his primary medium is the web — and, really, who’d want to?

It’s fun and gratifying to connect with people, to find common interests, and to make things as a group. That’s why the internet is so much more fun than reading the corkboard at your laundromat. Usually.

The challenge for each of us today — maker, worker, leader, or layabout — is to figure out where our own clear line should be drawn, and to determine how we effectively communicate where that line is in a way that’s useful, civil, and as open as we need for it to be. Again, though, all in the context of firewalling time to make things.

If this all strikes you as fancy, handlebar moustache talk from an old misanthrope who doesn’t get things like whatever the hell we’re calling “conversations” this week, maybe you’re on to something. You wouldn’t be the first to say so. And, if you’re honestly completely unburdened by doing the things that are important to you while staying in joyful personal contact with everyone who wants it from you — then, I do applaud you. I guess. Although, frankly, I think you’re probably fibbing at least a little.

Drawing Your Line

For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us, and here’s why: if you leave every channel open to everybody and anybody, all the time and without limit, you necessarily prevent yourself from ever stepping away from the fray for long enough to focus. You'll never make the time that it takes to produce the sort of good work that theoretically made you so appealing in the first place.

And, perhaps as importantly, you also can never devote your undivided attention to the biped mammals who are breathing air in the room with you. Here. People. With faces and hands. Not “friends,” but friends. Real people. Because, if total focus on the known important stuff in your life has to battle with a never-ending doorbell attached to your brain, it’s hard for me to imagine how your work, or your family, or your sense of who you are, alone in a room without the ringing, can possibly thrive. But, again, that’s really up to you to decide.

Balanced Patterns for Recovering Time to Make

If you’re determined to get back to work today — to start making more than SMTP queries — here are a few patterns for helping you find your way. Adapt as needed.

Clarify your needs

Think about what kind of environment you need to do your best work, and consider what you'd want to change today in order to make that environment more accessible to you for uninterrupted blocks of time.

Consider that the busy work, meta work, and stupid or boring monkey work in the life of a creative person should serve one purpose: clear the decks of distraction so you and your brain can work uninterrupted. To me, that is "Step 0."

Define “OFF”

Decide what it means to be “available” versus “not available” at a given time. How long can your world tolerate your absence, and what does it look like when you re-surface? What needs to change in order to minimize stress and drama? Remember, the time you make needs to be all yours to the greatest degree possible. If you can still hear the phone ring or the baby crying, you may not really be "OFF" yet.

Consider the equivalent of a safe word for when the really important stuff needs to punch through your firewall. This is a young field with blunt tools right now, so consider employing wetware; work with a partner, colleague, or friend to be your attention sentry during times when you need to go off the grid for half a day. Reciprocate.

Draw your line

Make it clear how, when, where, and for how long people can expect to interact one-on-one with you. Don’t hesitate to point to community forums and mailing lists to which you contribute, FAQs you’ve answered a million times, or any other resource that liberates the previous use of your attention by exposing the fruit of its labors to the world.

How? Could be lots of ways, but whatever you use, try to find automation and economies of scale. That means:

add info on your Contact page explaining what people can expect from you
use auto-responses and email templates
where necessary send short responses to clarify when you'll be available again

Also? Google. Tell people about this amazing new thing called “Google.” Apparently, it’s a service that helps people find all kinds of information without sending a single email. Handy.

Be honest

In the case of email in particular, you quickly learn the irony that a short response — far from retiring a topic — often is regarded as confirmation that you "want to play," providing unintentional encouragement to send you lots more email. And, then come the growing expectations, now that you've unconsciously shown yourself to be an email punk.

Listen: if someone starts demanding a level of engagement with you that you can’t meet, just say so. And consider telling them why. You'd never hesitate to say "I have a doctor's appointment," so don't be embarassed to say, "I can't talk to you now, I'm in the studio all morning." If you can't work because you're distracted by someone who wants to argue about how you spelled "wookiee" (don't laugh — it's happened to me twice; once when I was wrong and again when I was right), you need to cut the cord.

Also, keep in mind that most time burglars eat excuses for lunch. There's an entire industry around shooting down excuses, and it's called “sales.” Give people the honest attentional equivalent of “I have no money, and I'm not interested.” And, if that doesn't work? Yes, lie. Tell them you're dying, and today you're going to SeaWorld with your church youth group for the last time.

Let bits drop

You'll need to decide for yourself where the floor is in terms of requests for your attention that don't require (or deserve) a response. V14g#RA spam clearly does not need a "No, thank you," but what about the guy with the terrible new book who suddenly wants to be your boon companion and wants to "keep in touch" thrice weekly? For me? Those emails maybe don't get answered so much. (Sorry, I Have a New Book Guy: at least I didn't use your name)

Remember: for a lot of people, your one-time attention and decency will instantly be melted down to base metals for shit like PR blasts, "funny joke lists" (aka 'blogging for old people'), and frequent help desk-style requests. If you've decided that this stuff is out of scope for your time on The Marble, systematically destroy it with brutally efficient filters that are the equivalent of Tachy Goes to Coventry.

To paraphrase the great Lucas Jackson:

Sometimes null can be a pretty cool response.

Be courageous

If someone cannot understand or accept why the judicious use of your attention — and its application in the service of making work for a broader audience than exactly them — takes precedence over their need to repeatedly monopolize your time, dump them. This is not a good person.

But! Also remember to be cool

I’ll never forget the time that Jonathan Richman answered my stupid fan mail. Those 2 sentences on a piece of paper with his return address on it meant the world to me in 1988.

Always remember that some contact is just about a human connection, and that’s such a great thing. Just be realistic about how much of it you can personally manage, and then make the effort to reach back to people who are awesome.

And, NO, the whole point of this is that you can’t ever answer them all (and I’m not saying you should try), but if you can respond to 5, 10, or 20 emails or forum posts per week, without stepping on your “make” time, you’ll also make some really nice new friends.

Hint¹: Given limited time, always favor contact with young people; they need the high-five, and it means an awful lot when you reach back to them. These are good people.
Hint²: PR people who want to “thank you” for your work and then sign you up for a “webinar” do not count. These are not good people.

Noted in passing: Outside of various record sites, I can't immediately find anything like an official anything for Jonathan Richman today. Don't know if this is symptomatic of his long-professed affection for simple, old-timey things, or if he's just decided to no longer field questions about The Velvet Underground from stoney liberal arts students.

Identify and engage your high-value targets

Embrace the disingenuous charge of elitism (or, as I prefer to call it, maturity) by not pretending that everyone is equally “special” to you. Remind the people who matter to you that you’re always available for them, then tell them how to do that, including specific instructions (n.b. this is important for relatives who think the internet is just eBay, urban myths, and Joel Osteen). Get a friends-only email address. Get a friends-only GrandCentral number. Do whatever it takes to provide a backchannel for your super-secret network.

Widen the channels to the people you adore, and never make them suffer by your weird compulsion to wave at strangers. You have plenty of time to make new friends, but for God’s sake, don’t neglect the ones you already have and enjoy. These are good people.

Respect others

In the interest of sharing the aloha with all the makers and consumers in your world, consider making it excruciatingly easy to deal with you. Especially when it comes to email. Everything goes both ways, so remember that anyone you contact today could be having the best or worst week of his life; choose your ultimatums with care and context.

Work. work, work.

The hard work of a creative life is a topic that I’ll be returning to often over the next few weeks, but here’s my one pro tip for you today: once you’ve stolen back your time and wrangled your attention, put it to good use by making awesome stuff that everyone you want to delight can enjoy. Throw a giant tent party for the world and show off what you can do when you stop compulsively typing for an audience of one. Get your awesome out where we can all see it.

Make it, release it, and make more. And never apologize to anyone for demanding the respect for your attention that you, your work, and the people who enjoy it each deserves. Make the time.

”Making Time to Make: One Clear Line” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 07, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have

Merlin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:00:22 -0400

This article is Part 2 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

If you're a publisher, journalist, author, blogger, musician, artist, designer, cartoonist, or any other sort of person whose job it is to connect with people by communicating ideas, it's natural and wholesome for people who are interested in what you do (and many of whom are certainly makers-of-stuff in their own right) to develop a relationship with your work and to want a way to participate in it, add to it, and build upon it. It's equally great to reciprocate in a way that's collaborative, fun, and useful. God knows, it's anybody's dream to have people interested enough in what you do to find that they want to reach out to you. Talk about a first-world problem.

But, it can still be a big challenge, and in my estimation, it's a multi-faceted problem that involves scale, resource constraint, and old-fashioned scarcity. It's a disparity that confronts anyone who tries to exhaustively participate in every request for his or her attention with equally unrestrained brio -- especially if you ever hope to make the time to do strong, creative work constituting anything but perfunctory meta-communication.

Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you'd originally thought you were. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But if you're feeling off your game, it might be a good time to ask yourself whether you're primarily a writer of novels or of email messages. Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you're taking more meetings than photos these days?

What is it that you really do? What's the last thing you made that really excited you? Where are you and your work in all that "communication?"

The Connected Maker

The notion of the lone scribe, isolated in his garret and toiling away at an illuminated text, is an image that's as cliche as it is romantic. In fact, it's a hilariously quaint idea for those artists and makers who use social media and online communities to create, distribute, and expand upon their work.

You could even argue (and I'd happen to agree) that talented people like Jonathan Coulton, Ze Frank, and The Ninja have fashioned an enviable career largely out of making something delightful and by actively participating in projects that folks who've enjoyed their work are driving. Clearly, this is an emerging model for anyone who wants to take their act online, and it's generally great and very enjoyable for everyone involved. Except.

What happens at the theoretical point where Jonathan has to respond to so much personal email that it starts cutting into his songwriting time? Or, what if Ze were compelled to stop using forums and embedded video to communicate en masse, forced instead to conduct all his projects via one-on-one video IM sessions? And what about The Ninja? Well, imagine if, instead of appearing in a wildly-popular podcast, he were suddenly expected to visit every viewer's home to personally threaten to kill them. That's a lot of traveling. Even for a deadly ninja.

Nowhere, Man

In each instance, the dedicated attention might be fabulous for the individual who demands and receives the modern equivalent of face time. And, for a while anyway, it'd probably be a lot of fun for the makers to do. But, is this a sane, scalable, and sustainable way to do your work? I'd say no. No, it is not.

The power of connecting with people in an authentic way (no, not in that cheesy, half-assed, internet "friends" way) falls apart at the point where its resource consumption curtails your ability to keep making new stuff. It's a twisted paradox, for sure. But, in essence, it'd be a little like the Beatles skipping the writing and recording of Rubber Soul in order to catch up on 1964's fan mail.

Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.

”Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence

Merlin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:31:08 -0400

This article is Part 1 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make.
Next: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have
Finally: Part 3, One Clear Line

Over the years, novelist Neal Stephenson (wiki), has had at least a couple different pages where he's explained why he's chosen to limit the access he provides via email, interviews, and phone calls. It appears to be something he's given a lot of thought to.

Via Jessamyn, here's an Archive.org mirror of an older version of his page where he explains his introversion and need to stay focused on his work, alongside FAQs that answer many of the questions he typically has to field. Read it all though. It's pretty good. Stephenson's bottom line?

I simply cannot respond to all incoming stimuli unless I retire from writing novels. And I don't wish to retire at this time.

And here's another well known piece, Stephenson's "Why I am a Bad Correspondent", in which he lays out more details about why he's chosen to create an expectation based on guarding his attention so slavishly:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can't concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can't do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

He closes with a practical summation of why he's made the decisions he has:

I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.

As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), "I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I've made the decision, and now I live with it."

Like it or hate it, Neal Stephenson's position is clear and well-articulated. If a bit pitched, it's a stance I admire, and frankly I think it's an only slightly more extreme version of a position every maker needs to define if he or she expects to create the time to keep making anything.

”Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 05, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving

Merlin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:22:07 -0400

Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2008 | Inman News

Later this morning, I'm honored to be delivering the keynote address at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference here in San Francisco -- coincidentally, a conference I attended in 2000 as the "Senior Producer" (whatever that means) for the real estate dotcom I was working for.

I'll be doing my Inbox Zero talk and touching on some of the ways that real estate agents can use the system in their go-go, always-on sales environment.

There are several new slides in today's deck that I'll be premiering with this version of the talk -- the one above reflects something I've been returning to a lot lately in helping people to spend less time fiddling with their messages: stop obsessing about "organizing" your email.

The simplest way you could possibly archive

If you really learn to work the Inbox Zero methodology -- and, perhaps more importantly, if you accept the philosophical rethinking of email that Inbox Zero encourages -- you start to realize how little of your processed email needs to be filed, foldered, tagged, or otherwise thought about and manipulated. Once you're liberated the requests for your time and attention into where they really belong (tasks list, calendar, etc.), you're done with it. Fin. Move on.

Fifteen years ago, when I first started using internet email, I did what everyone I knew did. I saved and manually filed every message I ever received in a complex series of dated, taxonomical folders. It was, as Grandpa Simpson would say, the style at the time.

Get a horse (and key commands)

But, today, most of us have moved on to more modern applications like Gmail, Mail.app, and even Outlook, which permit sophisticated searching and "Smart Folders" that can do much of the organizing and thinking for us. One Archive to rule them all.

This is not to say that you cannot or should not ever manually file a message -- you or your company may have special needs that require record-keeping or fault-intolerant latency times for retrieving old messages. But, I very strongly encourage you to keep this system as simple as you can stand.

Once the action of a message has been liberated and moved to the right place (outside your inbox), it should require zero thinking to know where that dead message goes. Trash it or throw it into the Big Archive.

If it takes you more than exactly one second to get that message out of your inbox (yes, you should be using key commands for this stuff), your system needs a tweak.

Lose the shells?

So, the peanuts.

The idea here is that you probably don't have a place in your home or office where you store the shells from every peanut you ever ate. If you did, you'd definitely want to organize them by the year in which you ate them, perhaps keeping separate jars per-month or per-location where you ate the nut. You know. For posterity.

But you don't do that. It would be insane. Once you eat the peanut, the job of the shell is done. So lose it. Ditto dead email. Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can't discard it, throw it onto one big pile.

Learn more about Inbox Zero as well as Merlin’s speaking work.

”On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create

Merlin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:24:46 -0400

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast - NYTimes.com

Is Information Overload a Billion Drag on the Economy? - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

If you've seen the video of my Inbox Zero talk at Google, you may recall the moment when a few attendees start mentioning the hundreds of internal email messages they receive (and send) in a given day. I still remember, because I almost fainted.

Whenever I hear these and similar stories, the same question always comes to mind: "What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?" Well, apparently, it's a question a lot of people are starting to ask. Including Google.

A story in today's New York Times covers Sili Valley's new interest in curbing unnecessary interruptions and helping stem the flow of endless data.

Intel and other companies are already experimenting with solutions. Small units at some companies are encouraging workers to check e-mail messages less frequently, to send group messages more judiciously and to avoid letting the drumbeat of digital missives constantly shake up and reorder to-do lists.

A Google software engineer last week introduced E-Mail Addict, an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes.

A few more stats for you:

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times...

I'd also draw your attention to this infographic illustrating data points from recent studies on "workers' efficiency at information-intensive businesses." 28% of a typical worker's day is spent on:

Interruptions by things that aren't urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages -- and the time it takes to get back on track.

Sidenote: According to that same graphic, 20% of an average day is spent on meetings. Wow. Expressed as a year, that means a meeting you start on New Year's day would let out around the middle of March. Yikes.

Sounds like these folks have their work cut out for them.

I think it's important to clarify something here: there's nothing fundamentally wrong or irreparable about email as a tool. Given my position on how email gets (ab)used, you could be forgiven for thinking I want everyone to write each other letters once a year and ride cows to work. No. Not at all.

My point has always been that, as with any tool, email can be used for good or ill depending on the problems you've decided it can solve. One trouble is that our use and widespread adoption of email hasn't brought with it an equally widely-adopted understanding about how to use it, what content it's appropriate for, and what expectations we accept regarding when it's allowed to take us away from everything in our life that's not email. There are very few shared rules of the road right now. And that's making life hard for a lot of people.

I'm thrilled to hear that these ideas are bubbling up and getting the attention they deserve; email pain is usually a quiet, lonely, and shameful one, where people's work and home life suffer from the silent understanding that "too much is never enough" -- that trying to tamp down this always-on hysteria is a sign of weakness or sloth. That's ironic, given the biggest reason we reason use email so much: it's easy.

There's no cashier, editor, or therapist through which your message must pass. You set your own rules for what's appropriate to send, ask, or demand. You decide what it means when someone reacts (or doesn't react) in a given manner or time frame. Email is still the Wild West, and companies are paying billions of dollars a year to supply the six-shooters and Stetsons. Yeehaw.

I'll keep following these stories, because, I must tell you, I think it's going to be a rocky road for businesses to patch. Will whacky experiments like "No Email Fridays" have an affect on how we think about this medium? Only as much as "No Ice Cream Sundays" can help fix your eating disorder.

But, I'm glad they're trying, and I'm really glad the conversation has started at a higher level.

As for the decision-makers who are struggling with this stuff: these stats are great for getting companies off the bubble, but before you start breaking crockery, I suggest talking to lots of real employees about how they work, how they communicate, and how they might be able to help you.

Every time I speak to a company, I hear half a dozen depressing stories of management disconnection and communication bedlam, alongside one or two completely inspiring tales about how employees and small teams are working to fix things at a squad or platoon level. It's really amazing, and I wish it were something C-levels and managers were more cognizant of.

So, I suggest you be open to seeing email as just one tool among many, and be gracious about listening to those teams about how they've worked to fix or ameliorate these problems.

Bottom line (and I'll never stop saying this): stop trying to eradicate human communication problems by introducing waves of new technology or made-up rules of social engineering. A company with email problems is also experiencing people problems. Until you understand why the wetware isn't working like you'd expected, don't go nuts with top-down technology solutions and over-clever edicts.

There's a million tiny ways to improve how a business communicates with itself, and a lot of that intelligence is currently trapped, unmined, in the heads of people who've never been asked for an opinion. I like to think articles like this represent every knowledge worker's opportunity to raise his or her hand and say, "Hey, I have an idea."

[NYT links via Mrs. Mann]

”NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 14, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge

Merlin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:11:46 -0400

Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I'm getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we're just getting started on GS -- FAQs and more will be coming soon). I'm also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations -- it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

But, y'know, as I read Tantek's post, alongside his "Communication Protocols" notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I've been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I'll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.

Right this minute, you can create an email of unlimited length covering topics of unlimited scope and then send it to unlimited numbers of people -- whom you may or may not even know -- all at absolutely no cost to you. There is also no prohibition or boundary of any kind on how you phrase that email. There's no formal penalty or even feedback for when you're using email inappropriately (e.g. the dirty look that you'd get if you said something this weird to someone's face). Plus, of course, YOU get to decide (at least in your own head) exactly how quickly all those people should be getting back to you about whatever it is you emailed them about. And you can do this pretty much any time you want and as many times a day as it suits you. No Limits.

An optimist would say this indicates what a wonderfully flexible tool email is. But, a pessimist with 1500 unread emails will point out that this Wild West of Communication seems to bring out the nut in people.

As I say, there must be something about email's unusual combination of intimacy and distance that can get people very emotionally engaged in hammering out demands in an email message. And not just flames -- I'm talking about people whose de facto style is borne out of an uninhibited conduit between thoughts, emotions, or desires and the email medium that helps them convert that into some kind of request.

How and why this is related to Tantek's post, I'm not entirely sure. But I think there's some common ground here. Especially as this relates to that one-on-one idea and why it doesn't scale.

Email culture and etiquette -- if there is such a thing -- occurs when people have a sense of how their behavior will be seen and evaluated by anyone who is not themselves. The reason most of us wear pants to the grocery store is the same reason that some people think very hard about every word that goes into their email messages and what it will mean when people read them. They understand that the message should be more about the recipient than themselves. And the Great Ones will take the time to get the tone right too -- to phrase things so that misunderstandings and unintentional emotional provocations don't occur.

But if -- even without realizing it -- you see email primarily as a one-on-one medium for venting some...thing that's on your mind, you're going to produce a lot of electronic madness. Especially if you think no one is watching.

I'm going to think on this some more, but I'll close with a related thought on why this all goes straight back to Time & Attention 101.

Any system without scarcity or limitation will eventually suffer at the hands of people who aren't overtly aware of boundaries -- or who actively choose to break those boundaries because they can. Limitations in a communication medium not only make you think a little harder about what you have to say, they also encourage you to focus on what you and your recipient really need out of the exchange.

While I'm not suggesting anything as extreme as the five-sentence email, I wonder if this might be a fun exercise to try for a day:

The 0.001 Challenge

Imagine that the person receiving the email you’re composing receives 1,000 other message each day more or less identical to yours. What would you do to distinguish yours from the others? What change would make your email amazingly easy to deal with and not insane? Does the content of your email belong someplace else? Like an SMS, a face-to-face meeting — or maybe even in an angry, venting screed that you never send.

”Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Patterns for email as work conversation?

Merlin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:10:33 -0400

Inbox Zero is a system and philosophy that most benefits people who are overwhelmed by a high-volume of mystery meat email. The system works because it's stupid-simple, and the real art comes out of getting fast and ruthless at identifying requests for your time and attention that must be acknowledged or completed vs. the vast majority of stuff that needs very light attention (or can just get deleted).

But, not so fast -- what if, instead, you're receiving a high volume of easily identifiable messages? And what if your main "action" is reading, digesting, and then contributing? That's a bit trickier, as I have learned.

Every time I give the Inbox Zero talk to a tech-heavy group -- and most especially when I talk with engineers -- there's pushback on a couple issues. First, a lot of techies say they love it when everything gets routed through email, and second, they think an Inbox-Zero-type methodology isn't particularly useful for the type of communication that they get all day long. And that's conversations. Lots of conversations.

For many tech folks, email is the ideal and preferred way to avoid meetings and pointless flights. It's where they discuss features, debate implementation, and argue over the best solution to a problem. And that's how they like it. Some companies I visit with tell me they take pride in generating over 1000 person-messages each day. That's their culture, and love it or leave it.

This doesn't mean there's not room for improvement, but of course it's a valid and very real way to work.

Do stay tuned after the jump for your chance to join the conversation with comments and tips for managing conversational email, but first here's my observations on a few patterns that seem to work for a high volume of conversation based email:

Threading - you benefit greatly from an email app that lets you view messages grouped by conversation. This makes it easy to focus on one discussion as well as leap ahead as needed without distratction
Processing - Regardless of your style, I think it's still very valuable to process to zero on a regular basis, pulling out all the non-conversational emails that can be converted to action or immediately deleted. (more on processing email)
Filtering - It still seems valuable to identify lists and conversations that need less attention (or just don't need attention right now) so that you can keep them from grabbing you away from the nitty gritty. (more on filtering email)
Standards (esp. on subject and quoting) - Having a "house style" that your team agrees to use for subject lines and quoting will save you much heartache. If you've ever had to catch up on the latest additions to a three-week-old, high-volume thread, you'll instantly know whether everyone was on the same page.
Muting - I love mute functionality like that found in GMail. Basically, this let's you say "this is a conversation I don't need to follow any more," and new messages in the thread are archived automatically
Save and Search - Short, attachment-free, well-quoted messages make archiving and search a less-than-typical pain, so you can feel fine about saving old messages for as long as they remian useful to you. Then you can just pull them up via search as needed for historical purposes.

The Question to You

If your job requires you to keep up with a very high-volume of conversation email, please share your favorite tricks. Is the high-volume list-based system working for you? What helps you keep on top of things? What bits of Inbox Zero do and don’t help? If you could change one thing about the way your team handles email conversations today, what would it be?

”Vox Pop: Patterns for email as work conversation?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 12, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Meet Sandy

wood.tang — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:37:56 -0500

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I've been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it's really slick.

Sandy herself is built on Stikkit and named after Tim O'Reilly's real-life assistant. You interact with her by sending emails to a special address, using keywords like "remind me" or "remember to" to tell Sandy what you want to do, just like you would with another person.

Sandy recognizes dates and times in a number of formats, and will send you reminders whenever you assign a specific time. For example, if you wrote "remind me to take out the trash at 5 pm tomorrow," Sandy would note this and send you an email or text reminder close to that time, according to your preferences. You can also email Sandy commands to lookup stuff and send it back to you, very handy if you're on the move with an iPhone or Blackberry, or, you can always manage all your stuff on Sandy's website.

Sandy also supports recurring events and tags, so GTD users could easily turn it into a nice, trusted system with mucho lists and contexts. It even has group functions, so that if you CC Sandy on an email to someone else and give her instructions (Sandy, remember to ...), she'll send reminders to you both.

Combined with a voice service like Jott, Sandy could make an immensely useful personal system for someone who lives in email or is inclined to keep their stuff on the web. That, and she's kinda cute too.

”Meet Sandy” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 21, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"