Email overload and task management

Jack Vinson points to some interesting comments by Dennis Kennedy about email management (Email Management - Eating My Own Dog Food) and adds his own in More on email management:

He talks about what you do when you get beyond the "empty your inbox" idea. There are still all those articles you need to handle (those "do later" items). Dennis uses Outlook 2003's follow-up flags, but he has discovered that when he gets too many follow-ups, e-mail paralysis sets in again. This is where he (and I) moves away from email management to basic priority management. Operate intentionally: how frequently do I want to read and respond to email today? How much time do I have to devote to those thoughtful responses? And then stick to my plan!

And the tools I use need to support the way I want to operate. Dennis pines for "touch it once" systems, rather than "handle it later" systems.

Having recently (the last couple of months) discovered/enacted the power of the "empty your inbox" idea, it was interesting to read about Dennis's flagging approach. Since we're still in Outlook 2003 land, I thought I'd mention my own current approach.

Any email that arrives for which there is an associated task (even if that task is "reply to email"), which I can't process immediately while emptying my inbox that minute|hour|day, I file into an appropriate folder somewhere. Then I add a task item in my Outlook task lists, and date it. If I need to refer back to the email, and I suspect I'll forget which of the several possible folders I've filed it into, I add a reminder in the task item where to find the email item.

Of course, what this does is change an email overload problem into a task overload problem. But at least that recognises the nature of the problem - it's not that we've got too little time (or too many emails), it's that we've got too much to do.

The first nice thing about this is that each day I can look in my task list, and see exactly what things must be done today. Hopefully I get to do them. Things that slip behind, get highlighted in red. Things that are not quite essential yet are in a soothing muted black. I get some small satisfaction by seeing a number of crossed out gray tasks completed each day.

Periodically, I review the red tasks of things which have slipped behind. The moment of truth emerges - were they really as essential as I thought they were? Perhaps not. Then I either re-date them to when I think they should be carried out by, or delete them altogether if I decide that in fact they're never going to get done because they just aren't that important.

The second nice thing about this is that it breaks the email-as-to-do-list metaphor that I've operated with for years. Received email is communication, much of it of relatively low value, but some of it very important. It's not a set of tasks. The act of communicating something to someone (perhaps by composing and sending an email, even as a reply to someone else's) is an activity/task - and may be pleasurable or just something to be done.

I'd love to have a "touch it once" system too, but I suspect it would only ever exist if I had a team of highly capable, trustworthy and independent executive assistants to whom I could instantly delegate tasks to, together with a lot of spare time and not much to do. As it is, there are things which must be left behind for now, while there are others which it turns out will be left behind for ever.

Now, if only I could also break the email-as-surrogate-archival-file-system metaphor as well ...