Technology is amazing; you can now converse with someone the other side of the globe effectively instantly via IM and email.
The question is: is this a good thing?
Clearly in a lot of cases it is. But what about for non-urgent matters? Conversations that previously could have been conducted at a snails pace are now instant, and over in a few hours. People we have a single conversation with are, effectively, single serving friends.
On an individual level email is becoming a flood! Over the course of a day I can get up to 100 that might need replies – and that is probably a small amount.
So I am trialing a new three step approach to email:
- I will reply to around mail 48 hours after is recieved
- The exclusion to this rule is:
- If this is your first email to me
- The matter is urgent/needs resolving within 48hrs
- You’re a personal friend (or direct client)
- Any replies will tend towards just a few sentences
With this I hope to achieve a much more leisurely pace to email conversation. I’ve been using it effectively for the last few weeks and a few people have already commented that they particularly enjoy emailing/discussing with me.
From a technical perspective I filter mail with the following Gmail filter:
after:2010/[m]/[d-2] before:2010/[m]/[d-1]
Where d = todays day of the month and m = the current month. If anyone has a better filter (that I don’t have to change the dates for then please let me know!)
Very interesting. To cope with e-mail overload I prioritize my e-mail individually; if I don’t respond in a defined time-frame then it is auto-postponed, with the consequence that the postpone is spread over all the remaining email in the queue. In concrete, I use a combination of tasklists and incremental e-mail processing.