Email Handling

How can we radically alter how we handle email and still maintain some level of communication compatibility with the result of the email-centric world?

Here are some brainstorms from a Getting Things Done (GTD) perspective.

Email is not your inbox

Stop treating email as an inbox. It doesn't scale. It let's your time/attention be driven (hijacked) by others, making you mostly reactive, rather than mostly proactive, which you should be. See EmailEfail for more.

Email as a project

Treat email as just another project to work on, like any other project, and prioritize accordingly.

Email as reference

This means not only not treating email as inbox, but not even treating it as a set of next-actions, nor even a project!

Treat it like a stream into an ever growing reference. A reference that you only consult when you need to.

This has largely been enabled by the incredibly good "email search" of Google's Gmail.

"search as interface" has been the only thing that has allowed me to stay at all afloat in my email.

I'm trying this:

• Don't bother to process email at all.
• Just let it accrue in the inbox.
• Until I need something, then I go search for it.
• e.g. when I am working on a project, I have a window open into the results for searching for that project in my email.
• If people really need me to respond, they will contact me in some other way per my CommunicationProtocols.
• Or I'm ok with dropping their communications.

This is not a 100% solution, but it has drastically reduced the amount of time I spend "in email", and nearly eliminated that back of the mind stress I used to feel to "check" my email.

redundancy

Inevitably email providers go down, sometime for hours at a time. While it is best to not depend on email for productivity, it may be worth setting up multiple email providers for some degree of redundancy for receiving/sending emails.

If this is important to you, in short:

• get your own domain and set it up with simple hosting that allows unlimited email aliases/forwarders e.g. mine is tantek.com
• set up free accounts at both http://mail.yahoo.com/ and http://gmail.com
• setup an alias at your domain that forwards to both accounts
• set the reply-to on both those accounts to be that alias at your domain

This way you can use either site to read/search all your email, and send as well. Thus if/when either one goes down, you can use the other. Given that both services have high availability, odds that both will be down simultaneously are miniscule, and it has yet to happen AFAIK.

For an additional degree of redundancy:

• get a BlackBerry
• set up your BlackBerry email to receive/send from/to both of those accounts as well
• set the reply-to on the email account that comes with your BlackBerry to the same alias
• update the alias to forward to your BlackBerry account in addition to the Yahoo and Gmail accounts.

related

• EmailEfail
• EmailReduction

references

• David Allen: Getting Things Done

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