You Have Too Much Mail
Take a look at your computer screen and the surface of your desk: A lot is going on.
Right now, I count 10 running programs with 13 windows on my iMac, plus seven notes or documents on my computer desk and innumerable paper piles, folders and books on my “main” desk, which serves primarily as overflow space.
My 13 computer windows include four for my Internet browser, itself showing tabs for 15 separate Web pages. The tasks in progress, in addition to writing this review (what was that deadline again?), include monitoring three email accounts, keeping up with my Facebook friends, figuring out how to wire money into one of my bank accounts, digging into several scientific articles about genes, checking the weather in the city I will be visiting next week and reading various blogs, some of which are actually work-related.
And this is at home. At the office, my efforts to juggle these tasks would be further burdened by meetings to attend, conference calls to join, classes to teach and co-workers to see. And there is still the telephone call or two — on one of my three phone lines (home, office, mobile).
A century ago, time and motion studies were conducted to understand precisely how various tasks of physical labor were carried out and how they could be done more efficiently.
The results were revealing: What a bricklayer did in 18 steps, it turned out, could be done in just five. Torkel Klingberg begins “The Overflowing Brain” with a sort of “time and attention” study: an eye-opening vignette of a day in the mental life of a typical corporate manager.
Mere minutes or seconds after beginning one task, she is interrupted by another; she spends the first 90 minutes of her day reading and sending email and devotes as much time thereafter to updating and re-ordering items on her to-do lists than to actually getting things done.
Continue Reading: “You Have Too Much Mail”
Photo by kveselyte.
Steve Reeves on June 1st, 2009 9:01 am
This post really resonates with me, and I’m sure will with others too.
When I first discovered spaces in Osx 10,5 I was really excited.
Now I’m just overloaded trying to stay on top of email, Google Reader, Twitter and Webmaster tools :-(
Steve
RedHotFranchises on June 1st, 2009 5:16 pm
Seems to be natural that way. The whole world will always be filled with junk, same goes for your computer desk and your desktop as well.
Make your desk your work haven, put aside all of the other things into a separate tray and the rest goes into a pigeon hole, and do the same for your email inbox, whatever works best for you just take time to find it!
Jaclyn on June 2nd, 2009 1:31 pm
One way of controlling your too much email problem is to get rid of the junk that you never really need or read to begin with, which can be easily done by checking the ones that you know you will never read and then sending them to spam, this will ensure that you wont get emails from them in your inbox again. another thing to do is to set aside one special time during your day or week that is meant just for email, that way rather than opening them everytime they are sent to you and you stopping what you are doing, you can read and take care of them all at once.
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