Are you experimenting with email? Should you?

(The screen shot is from The IT Crowd - Series 1 - Episode 5 - The Haunting of Bill Crouse where Roy takes a support call about "email broken!" IT Crowd - Roy and Judy)

There are lots of mentions of email in experiments in Edison, which is not surprising given that it's a huge productivity challenge. A few include:

• Try having a VA monitor and filter my email
• turn off Gmail's inbox unread count
• Extreme Batching - Intentionally Creating a Weekly "Vacation Tax"
• Track my computer usage and see if it makes me more focused
• Only do things I have planned

I'm curious: What email experiments have you done? How'd they work out? Any that you'd like to try?

(P.S. For new readers I thought I'd go back and find some email posts from the past. I hope they help.)

• Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time
• Control your email addiction by ... checking more often!
• Got the email blues? Only three things you can do: Get fewer, Get faster, Get control
• How to GTD-ify fuzzy emails, plus a subject line hacking primer
• The World's Simplest Productivity Method, with Bonus Mini-Processing Examples
• Use Gmail's "star" to highlight your good news

Comments

[Will]

One striking feature of discussions of eMail is this: they rarely if ever give a solid operational definition of the task. I find it helpful to get a bit anal about this. Here's my definition:

Input: a random stream of mail
Process: read, note and file
Output: 1. a list of tasks 2. filed reference material

For me, the key is to separate out the responses from the reading. (I am a slow responder: If I responded to mail as I read it, I would never get clear.)

Here's my process, done in batches a couple of times a day:
1. copy inbox to "Process now" folder (HUZZAH!! INBOX ZERO!!)
2. work through "Process now"
- this is presented grouped by conversation, which immediately eliminates the majority of mails from consideration
- read the last mail of a conversation
- if I need to do anything else, drag to task list (as attachment if necessary) and tweak header. I use Mark Forster's DWM process for task management, so I add a due date one month out ("tab tab mo")
- read last mail of next conversation
3. copy contents of "Process now" to "Reference 2010", a backed up folder on my C drive.

And yes, I do have filters for urgent mails and mails from management, which get scanned more frequently. Sadly, we haven't got the "Do It Tomorrow" culture fully in place yet.

So mail management really isn't an issue for me. (50-100 work mails / day: ymmv)

Doing those pesky tasks, on the other hand...

[Matthew Cornell]

Thanks for the detailed description, Will. I've not been keeping up with the productivity world, so DWM is new to me - http://www.markforster.net/blog/2010/2/1/dit2-af5-who-cares-what-its-called-this-is-what-im-working-o.html . Good work!