7 issues with email overload and ONE solution that gmail should do

http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/seven-email-problems-one-solution-i-think/

by mulquem • 12 years ago

27 24 12 years ago

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cr3ative• 12 years ago

Wow, what a gigantic middle finger to people that try to communicate with you. No, deleting your emails programatically because you haven't got around to reading them is not a good idea. What about all the no-reply alert emails you'll miss?

As for this: "Government departments and legal entities who communicate only through email can override this" - who decides this? The mail provider? Are you trusting the sender to use that flag responsibly?

gte910h• 12 years ago

u. No, deleting your emails programatically because you haven't got around to reading them is not a good idea

Archiving them is. You can't have more attention than you have. If people try to get more attention then you can give, you have to triage. Backloads of email are huge piles of stress, and you realistically will almost never get to them

Once you've done the emails you've chosen to handle, use a mail client with some form reply to process some things which that's amenable to handling, and archive that which isn't important beyond that.

You should ALSO work directly to stop getting CCed on so many things and to communicate with fewer exchanges on more important topics. Get co-workers to not bury the lede, and to get items which need your decision or action to very prominently feature that in the title and first line of the message.

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

I'm not really sure if this would be a good UX, but among other technical challenges:

Government departments and legal entities who communicate only through email can override this, so the inbox owner knows that something has come from DVLA (driving department) or HMRC (money department)

I can't think of any good (and realistic in the present environment) way to do that. How is your email provider supposed to know what senders are authorized "government departments and legal entities"? In a way that spammers (and others who are offended by this UX) can't easily work around? And who's going to decide what entities qualify anyway?

XorNot• 12 years ago

If the government GPG signed their emails, then it would trivial and notionally unfakeable.

claar• 12 years ago

I was drowning in email too not long ago, and decided I was tired of it. The proposed solution in this article of having your mail client threaten you with an ultimatum doesn't seem well thought out.

First, I unsubscribed to absolutely anything with a legitimate unsubscribe link, instead of archiving/deleting it daily/weekly as I had before. Over time, this made a dramatic difference in the amount of email I received each day.

Second, though barely needed after #1, I use a couple of filters to get rid of things I can't unsubscribe to for various reasons.

I now keep a near-zero-inbox, and find email to be much less of a burden to manage.

mkohlmyr• 12 years ago

I too did exactly this around 5 weeks ago for my personal email address, and maintain an inbox of less than 5 emails at any given time.

I spent almost 4 hours moving old read and unread emails into a small set of folders en masse (thousands of emails). I unsubscribed or set up folder filters for all mailing lists.

I went from receiving ~20 emails per day to ~3-4 (in my main inbox). Once you get rid of the nonsense keeping track and archiving the important stuff is really not that hard.

cwyers• 12 years ago

This is good advice. Hotmail (of all things) has a feature I wish Gmail would implement, similar to the author's suggestion but I think far more useful -- for e-mail newsletters that you specify, it will only keep the most recent.

The other thing I would recommend is having separate accounts for work and personal e-mail. I understand that for some people, there's a fair amount of overlap. But even if you just use an alias for work e-mail and put it into a folder in your regular inbox, that separation of concerns can make it a lot less overwhelming.

rrggrr• 12 years ago

Sanebox ( https://www.sanebox.com/ ) and Google apps scripting has me a near-zero inbox.

normloman• 12 years ago

If you're getting to many emails, the problem isn't your client. The problem is your organization. Stop making yourself so available to everyone. Stop insisting on being CC'ed on every discussion. Give employees autonomy so they don't have to get your approval to do every damn thing. Stop being the point of contact to every client. You don't have time to personally deal with everyone.

graeme2• 12 years ago

I highly recommend an assistant. It's not as expensive as you think. Just get someone you trust.

I hired someone to filter my email for a start. They're putting it into three areas: Fast response, eventual response, weekly report

It's made a pretty big difference so far. I'm working on creating procedures that will let her figure out how I handle some of the routine stuff.

sunir2• 12 years ago

I would love to do this but I don't know how to start to make it effective. How did you go about sourcing, hiring, organizing work for, and training your assistant?

_mulder_3• 12 years ago

You could try looking at these previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1753080

http://blog.zeromail.com/2013/03/27/zeromail-goes-live-perso...

graeme2• 12 years ago

I originally went with someone on elance. She did well, but then did something weird (deleted her work email account when she thought she had been hacked). This made me not trust her.

I decided to go with someone I already knew. I know a bunch of people age 18-25 who are interested in picking up extra work. (I teach standardized tests, that age group is my target market). I asked one I already knew and trusted.

All around north america, college grads and students are looking for work and work experience. If you can filter well, you can find excellent, affordable workers. They'll move on eventually of course.

mercer• 12 years ago

I've been thinking of trying my hand at an app that is nothing more than a thin layer on top of email. It would receive email, occasionally send email, but not really do anything else with the user's actual email account.

I'm not very familiar with email other than as a user, so my question is: how easy would this be? Ideally I want to avoid mucking about too much with the email protocols or store a person's entire collection of emails...

noddingham• 12 years ago

I'm starting to wonder when people are going to stop trying to "fix" email. Email is amazing at what it was designed to do and doesn't actually need fixing. The way it is abused in your/my/most organizations would be (imo) a better place to look for something to fix.

skizm• 12 years ago

Work your filters and stars. Also you should be aggressively marking things spam/important as needed. Gmail gets smart pretty quickly. This might be tough with a backlog but the filters can be applied retroactively.

_mulder_3• 12 years ago

This is very good advice. However, it would be great if Google could introduce a time element to filters. i.e; 'apply label 'ToRead' if email is over 5 days old and is unread and move to 'unread' folder'. Or 'mark message as 'priority' if unread after 4 hours and from dave@important.com'

thomaslangston• 12 years ago

HA! No.

I unsubscribe from any email list that sends 2 useless emails.

I set email lists to the absolute lowest frequency and verbosity acceptable (daily or monthly vs. immediate, summary only vs. full content).

I filter & archive anything that doesn't require a response (articles, coupons), or that notifies me via other channels (social network notifications).

I maintain a strict separation between work and personal email accounts.

I turn off email notifications and sync by default on my devices. I only enable them when I expect to receive email that needs to be immediately reacted to, and only for the correct accounts for the required time period.

I am available by text, IM, voice and video calls. I can be contacted for immediate concerns quickly without email.

I only read email twice a day, at the beginning and at the end of the work day.

I maintain a FAQ. I have answers to questions that I'm asked frequently on file to copy/paste. I publicly publish these answers when possible.

I skim emails and respond immediately or flag them with a TODO. I prioritize TODOs with a rough date (today, tomorrow, next week, next month) to respond. I don't bother archiving unfiltered email because read, non-flagged is effectively invisible to me.

_mulder_3• 12 years ago

My suggestions would be:

1. Seperate work and personal - There is no need to be receiving emails from friends, Amazon or whoever when you're at work. Have a separate Inbox to process these, they will be waiting for you when you chose to look at them, not to distract you when replying to work emails.

2. Unsubscribe from everything - When was the last time you looked at or read a promotional email or weekly newsletter? If it wasn't recently (a month), then unsubscribe.

3. Manage your contacts - Do you need to be CC'd into every email? If you don't want to receive so many emails from a colleague, just email politely and say, due to the amount of emails you get, please don't CC me unless it's vitally important. This may have the added benefit of drawing their attention to what they're doing and make them reconsider who else they're CC'ing.

4. Consider separate email accounts for separate purposes - Running a businesses, a non-profit (as per OP) and you attend conferences alot? Why not have four email accounts? That way you can separate each of your 2 'jobs' and have one email for your personal friends and family, The Queen and Amazon. A separate 'public profile' account can be used to field incoming requests for help or advice or meet-ups from strangers or acquaintances that you may meet at Conferences or on your blog. These are unlikely to be high-priority but you can have a scan through at your leisure when you get the time without them interrupting your normal work flow.

However, I can't help but feel sometimes, people who receive thousands of emails it's because they actually like to receive thousands of emails because it makes them feel and look more important and popular than they perhaps are. How many of those email chains were actually started by you sending out emails to other people? Or inviting people to contact you on websites or conferences? We've all heard someone subtly boasting about coming back from holiday and having x hundred emails. All they're really saying is "look how popular I am and how much people need me". The irony of course is that, even with all of those unanswered emails, it's amazing how things just kept working as normal.

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

Doesn't anyone does 4) ?

I mean, it's free. Sure, it requires a proper email client so that you don't go insane with all the web interface nonsense.

amichal• 12 years ago

My #1 wishlist item for Gmail: Group by Sender Domain.

- When I have 5 outstanding emails from @client.com i need to reply baddly. - When i have 5 outstanding from @asdfsa.com with subjects like 'Buy Viagra' its a good sign i should ban @asdfsa.com. - When i have 100 outstanding email from @ec2-hosts.mycorp.com it probably means i need to fix some logging somewhere.

pling• 12 years ago

That's an awesome idea. Would kill for that.

sunir2• 12 years ago

You can create a filter for this in 30 seconds. Click the down arrow in the search box. Type the domain in the from field. Click "Create filter from this search". Label them. Done.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

I've found Unroll.me[1] to be hugely helpful. There are a lot of mailing lists for services I'm subscribed to that I'd still like to receive, but I don't want them cluttering up my inbox. Unroll.me instead gives me a daily summary of all these messages and gets them out of my inbox. (As a bonus, the messages are still there, just auto-archived, so you can get to them if needed.)

No disclaimer, don't know anyone there or have any incentive to say nice things other than that I enjoy the product.

[1] https://unroll.me/

7 issues with email overload and ONE solution that gmail should do

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