Subscribe As mentioned in a previous post, many inboxes are overflowing and the situation looks set to get worse.
What’s the answer:
- Better discipline?
- Email bankruptcy?
- Choosing to use a different medium (like IM) for some conversations?
- Better email clients?
Probably all of the above.
Xobni have had a go at improving outlook – by making attachments and emails easier to find, and by making conversations easier to refer back to.
Yet more information to process: xobni’s coloured bar chart shows data about your email frequency.
It’s nothing radical (just adding functionality that outlook needed to stay competitive with other email software), but the philosophy is that every little bit helps, I suppose. Reducing the time it takes to file things, and retrieve things makes emailing more efficient. You can process more information faster.
Trouble is, I don’t think I can handle much more information. I appear to have reached my maximum rate of decision making. To to answer more queries and solve more problems in a day might well finish me off altogether. The bottleneck isn’t in the mechanism of sending and receiving mail. The bottleneck is my brain’s capacity to come up with worthwhile answers fast enough.
Anybody else feel like this?
Well, you’re not alone… There is so much information out there, not just in email, but on the internet in general. It IS “mindboggling.”
The reality is that most everyone out there is not immune to it, and the people who are going to shine will be those who deal with it better than others.
I think alot of it has to do with personal discipline, AND the abilitly to “let go.” Some emails don’t need to be responded to, some should be put aside for the day when you DO have time to respond (yea, right!) and some are worthy of your attention right now.
Isn’t it just like our old time management challenges? We’ll never get it all done, instead isn’t it about working on the right stuff, and letting go of or delegating the stuff we can’t get to?
Marsha
You’re right, Marsha! It’s the ability to focus and prioritise that makes a person successful. Efficiency can only take you so far.
Which is why software that improves efficiency can’t solve the email problem.
If you’re going to plug into the the whole world, you’re gonna get more data than you can handle.
Just say no!
The problem with being more efficient is that we then take on more things, and the cycle repeats itself.