Inbox Zero

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

Merlin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:17:46 -0400

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has ﬁve stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me ﬁgure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

”Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 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 ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Annoying Productive Guy At Work: Shaming Users One Color At A Time

Derrick Bostrom — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:08:52 -0400

I was recently put in charge of on-site tech services after a two year apprenticeship as the assistant. Surveying the mess left to me by my former boss, I’m amazed at how many open projects he allowed to grind to a dead stop on his watch. I suppose it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Bloated from the effects of rapid growth, my company suffers from years of rampant position-creation and ill-considered solution grafts. Left to grapple with a culture of contradictory goals, incomplete training and an end-to-end process similar to Sartre’s “No Exit” (“hell is other departments”), I’m surprised my predecessor got anything done at all.

My new assistant is an 18-year-old “millennial,” as I guess we’re calling them now. He’s a young computer Borg who could hack before he could walk. In a probably vain attempt to keep him from quitting before I get in at least one decent vacation, I’m constantly looking for ways to keep him engaged.

“What IS all this crap??” He guffaws at the cascade of emails that greets us every morning. “Do you really READ all of this??”

You don’t read it, I tell him, you PROCESS it. It’ll take months before he learns to ﬁsh the actions out from the dozens and dozens of messages clogging his in-box all day long. But once he learns to manage the broadcast, he’ll also get a front-row seat for the epic drama of fear and heartbreak that passes through our mail server every day. Our company’s high reliance on email creates such a dense barrage that it creates a perfect means through which things fall through the cracks.

I work in a high-turnover, low-skill, interruption-driven work environment where a strong back and the ability to keep the rabble in line will get you a lot farther than any sort of transcendent appreciation and mastery of technology. Folks here are typically over-worked and under-paid, and when I have to insert myself into their already overburdened workﬂow, their reactions range from passive-aggression to open hostility.

A couple of week ago, I found an old performance review while cleaning out my desk. On the ﬁnal page, scribbled in an area marked “goals,” was an odd item which I’d forgotten all about: “develop training program for helping leadership better manage email.” Last year, I was told to work with our Outlook users whose mailboxes had grown too large, announcing that those folks above 60 megabytes would be having their accounts suspended. (Of course, the deadline came and went with no action taken, despite some of my users having in-boxes more than ten times the allowable size.) The project came to mind the other day as I looked over a co-worker’s shoulder.

“Why don’t you delete that unread ﬁve-megabyte email from someone who hasn’t worked here since last spring?” I asked her.

She looked up at me with heavy lidded eyes and replied, “I’m…just…too…busy….”

This person’s experience was typical. It would have been a blessing if her account was suspended; the system was all but useless to her anyway. Trying to explain best practices to such a hapless user is a lost cause. I decided to try an approach that combined humor, some color, and a little public humiliation. Every week, I would load all of my users into a spreadsheet sorted by mailbox size. I gave each increment of 100 megs a different color and attached a gag color legend, changing the gags every week. One week, the red users (my worst offenders) had “completely given up,” the next they were “blackballed from the Clean Plate Club.” Last week, they were “helping the terrorists.” And so on.

It got people’s attention. Yesterday, my heavy-lidded co-worker ﬁnally asked for some help. First we separated out all actionable stuff. Then we ﬁshed out all relevant reference material. Then we banished the rest. I stitched everything into place with a small but powerful handful of rules, then showed her the result. She looked it over for a minute or two, then suddenly turned to me with a startled look on her face. “My god!” She cried, pointing to the screen. “I didn’t realize this was due on Monday!”

In effect, I’ve started an ongoing email clinic. Some people respond to the competition: they want a lower number than Lumpy in the next desk over. Others will just add me to their pile of unread messages. But folks are also coming forward who are genuinely interested in freeing themselves. I’m sure my approach won’t work on everyone. After all, no one gets up at the crack of dawn and tries to cram 60-plus hours of work into 40-hour work week, just so they can satisfy the arbitrary impositions of some guy from another department that they hardly know. But I keep the offer out there, and eventually I’ll rescue the ones worth saving. To be honest though, I’m really just trying to save myself. It’s these modest checks in the win column that help me make it through the work day.

”The Annoying Productive Guy At Work: Shaming Users One Color At A Time” was written by Derrick Bostrom for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Merlin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:37:00 -0400

These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title.

And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email.

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**

The full 1-hour video for Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation at Google is available for free down here — or check out this post about the video and slideshow.

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”
Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I ﬁrst suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a deﬁnition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”
Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”
Inbox Zero: Where ﬁlters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating ﬁlters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”
Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”
Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and ﬁnd a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”
Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on ﬁnding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”
Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, a clean record and a fresh start.”
Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

These are, to date (2006-03-13), our most popular posts on email and were recently collected in a recap article, “Becoming an Email Ninja.”

Five fast email productivity tips “There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in ﬁve no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.”
Quick tips on processing your email inbox - “The basic idea is to ﬁrewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.”
Writing sensible email messages - “As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with. ”
Five email tics I’d love for you to lose - “For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these?”
My email diet - “Gmail’s made me see the value of having very few actual folders for storing new and archived mail. It makes it much easier to track and organize your mail on the ﬂy, plus Google’s search and labeling tools let you conﬁdently shunt items out of your inbox constantly without fear of having stuff disappear. So I decided to try a little experiment.”
Fresh Start: The Email DMZ - “Think about it: how much stuff in your life has gotten unmanageable simply because you decided at some point that you were too behind to ever make a difference? More than anything you need a way to recover these projects from the brink — to ﬁnd the handle that lets you stop making it worse and start seeing a way back toward daylight.”
4-1/2 tiny ways to master Mail.app - “Seriously, though, suck it up and just check for new mail as seldom as your job and your patience will possibly permit. Really push the envelope on this, even just for half a day, and see if you don’t notice a difference. The world actually can spin without you for a while (but just a little while).”
Open Thread: The value and quality of email at work - “If I ran a company and learned that most of my employees were spending that much time touching internal email, I’d ask my managers: ‘For how many and which employees is six hours of email each day adding value to the company?’ Maybe that’s just me.”

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Merlin does a live presentation on Inbox Zero from time to time. The latest version of the presentation was delivered on July 23, 2007 at a Google Tech Talk in Mountain View, CA. You can download a PDF of the slides for the presentation and can watch the 58-minute video of the talk and Q&A right here:

Get Inbox Zero – Live and in Person

Bring Inbox Zero to your company by inviting Merlin to speak at your next event. It’s fast and painless to book Merlin through Premiere. »

”43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Inbox Zero

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving

The simplest way you could possibly archive

Get a horse (and key commands)

Lose the shells?

The Annoying Productive Guy At Work: Shaming Users One Color At A Time

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Looking for the Inbox Zero video?

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

Related articles

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Get Inbox Zero – Live and in Person

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**