I came down with some kind of flu on Friday. I'm delighted to say I managed to hold it together and manage public transport, a walk home and to change my clothes before I fell to pieces. Lots of crap happened here while I was out and I thank the gods daily for TH and her ability to get things done while I was sleeping off this thing.
I have lots of awesome things I was going to write about, but honestly, if I can manage to get a load of laundry into wash, write this post, pack my work bag and clear out my mail from the weekend, I'm high-fiving myself to bits.
High Five.
Getting through those mails.
Yeah.
Right.
I read most of my mail on my phone. This is not unusual. The average wage slave consumes mail and work information from a mobile device. In fact, they may own more than one, maybe even three and a half. Hell, I have possession of four right now.
Well, no matter what, I still let things fall through the crack because it is pretty darn hard to keep track of the 100 to 140 mail messages I get a day over five or six accounts.
This is also not an unusual thing. Most of us (wage slaves or not) have more than one mail account. We may read them from one place, but mail comes from a million places and it is getting harder to manage.
Not only do we have mail now, most of use instant message (iMessage, jabber, yammer) or collaboration tools (Slack, HipChat, Lync) within our work groups to communication internally to minimize the interruptions that caused by email threads.
How can we keep track of all this?
I'm not sure we can. Lots of tools allow you to get organized with all this information - you can set alerts and notifications, defer answering mail, archive messages, set rules within your mail and other good things.
For me, I'm trying to read my mail quickly from my phone, but when I get to my office, I'll triage what I can from my laptop. I try really hard to keep email at bay by not answering it as it comes in, but in one bulk slug. I pick either push notifications or emails when dealing with collaborative tools - I refuse to double the amount of attention that software commands of my resources.
When I get home from work, I let it pile up and read it after dinner.
As for the fun email from my other five accounts - that gets read the same way. Triage, bulk and a decent purge through once a week and a lot of unsubscribing.
Unsubscribing is your friend. You will never miss what you didn't know existed. Trust me.
How do you handle all this information to keep yourself productive and on top of your game?
