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Poll #17293 E-mail management
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58
E-mail management
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I strive to attain Inbox Zero and regularly succeed.
11 (19.0%)
I strive to attain Inbox Zero and occasionally succeed.
16 (27.6%)
I use a system of filters for my incoming mail. It works pretty well and I rarely miss stuff.
16 (27.6%)
What's Inbox Zero?
18 (31.0%)
I miss stuff all the time. Allll the time.
9 (15.5%)
AHAHAHAHAAAAA no.
17 (29.3%)
(This post triggered by the knowledge that I am rarely, if ever, fully caught up on e-mail communication. It is perpetually frustrating, and I never feel like I can take a break from it.)
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I don't use filters - I found that messages that didn't at least hit the inbox never got read. I have several folders for stuff that needs dealing with at some point (e.g. 'accounts', 'AO3' and a generic 'anytime') but stuff only goes into once of those after I've read it.
The one I should actually set up and use is "waiting" i.e. stuff where I need a response and need to chase it up.
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I found this to be true of my personal e-mail so stopped doing it. For work e-mail I use three broad filters and that seems to work well (because if anything is more than one layer deep in the folder structure, then I miss it).
The one I should actually set up and use is "waiting" i.e. stuff where I need a response and need to chase it up.
I like this idea. I use the "flag" system in Outlook but I find that it mostly just stresses me out. :(
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That or "I need to go find something out but then really need to reply".
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I have on occasion used a professor’s phone number, but only in what more or less counted as an emergency (I had the flu, for instance, and my absence was not only going to be a problem for MY grade but potentially for four other people’s due to it being a group project, and I basically left him messages EVERYWHERE I HAD ANY POSSIBLE ACCESS because he was not exactly a douche but was known to be a bit of a dick over Rules sometimes so I was clearly establishing that I had done full due diligence in attempting to contact him, and also establish myself as someone who would do things like call the History Department Office to leave him a message, thus implying that yes I knew how various office-structures at this particular university worked and if he was a dick in this case I knew who to go talk to because it was the year of the big H1N1 scare. Ahem. Etc).
But I’m not even sure I’d do that anymore, since that was seven years ago when smartphones were Exciting Toys instead of Pretty Standard.
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And I'm otherwise pretty good at not letting it get too far out of hand, but I still never manage actual Inbox Zero except raaaaaaarely, because I always have at least a handul of things sitting in there to remind me they exist and there is Something I need to do wrt them.
(I dearly wish I could tell my university that I do not give a fuck about any of the shit they are emailing me about, unless it pertains to a security concern or a campus closure. This is not, like, classmates or professors, mind you! Nor is it the newsletters from the two colleges I am enrolled in for my major and my minor! This is just blast emails about eleven million irrelevant things. :|)
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Academic mailing lists are awful, especially during term time.
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so yes.
usually though people understand and I just own it once I get out of the shame spiral.
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Absolutely!
My answers to the poll are contradictory because my success rate is highly variable.
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My workplace can be kind of cutthroat, so I tend to keep emails as a sort of CYA, so if I do something and someone asks why, I have an email that says, "Well so-and-so instructed to do xyz". I hate throwing people under buses like that but sadly that seems to be the way things work at my workplace.
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It's good to have records of work-related decision-making processes. It's a shame your workplace operations use it in a confrontational way. :/
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I don't get that much email. Maybe three or four messages per day, really? And most of those will be auto-generated stuff like newsletters and such, things that I can skim over and then archive. I'm very selective about signing up for newsletters from shops and sites. Almost never do it, and fairly quickly hit the unsubscribe link if I find I've stopped actually paying attention to them. Then there are comment notifications from LJ and DW and such, which I tend to try and reply to a couple of times a week.
I use gmail and Husband taught me a system where everything that is no longer relevant for something or other, order confirmations and what have you gets archived right away. I use gmail's tab system (although I wish they'd let me rename them) so I don't know if that counts as filters? I don't really use the star system much in gmail. Mostly for if I've ordered something for Christmas or Husband's birthday so that I can hide the confirmation emails and whatnot from him but still keep them handy.
(Yes, I'm feeling a bit better, although still hiding. Not very good at this hiatus stuff really. Too nosy.)
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60% can be skim-read and discarded
30% can be read, replied to and filed that day
10% must be carefully read and trigger a non-trivial amount of work that can take anywhere from two days to a couple of weeks
Then there's personal e-mail. I receive very few newsletters as am a habitual unsubscriber. Notifications from LJ, DW and Twitter trigger varying amount of "work"; as you know, I'm a stickler for being responsive, especially in my journal. I use the star system a lot, particularly for online ordering.
(Glad you're feeling better.)
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I suspect the person doing your old job is going to be very grateful for the retained stuff. It does take time to get up to speed after you've been off for months.
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One thing that I was doing was moving anything not actually work related out of the work inbox, into a 'read at home' folder. Which, I remember to read about once a week!
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I wish that trick would work for me, but there's virtually nothing in my work e-mail that's not work-related. :/