Fighting email backlog

Posted in: Drivel

It's starting to get ridiculous.. For 2005, I have literally hundreds of unanswered personal emails (over a thousand actually), and many of these are from good friends who've written paragraphs to me, and me only, with yet no reply. Not good. If you're one of those, I'm sorry! Changes are being made...

The "good email" paradox

There's a weird phenomenon I've experienced for a long time now. If I get a quickie email from someone I can fire one off back no problem. But if someone's put obvious thought, time, and care into it I naturally want to reciprocate and reflect that in my reply. Because I'm often trying to fire through emails at the beginning of a day or during work I put these aside for later. And so often later never comes.

The counter-intuitive result is that the throwaway emails are replied to, while the substantial careful ones aren't. Crazy!

Solution?

One project-manager possibility is to dedicate a chunk of time per day to answering these. This however pre-supposes it's a mechanical job. But it isn't - if it were I could just bang out a reply there and then amongst all the sundry daily activities. It's exactly the reason they aren't replied to immediately in the first place (i.e. that I want to do a worthy job) that means they end up queued for ages.

So perhaps the solution is to realise when I'm in the right state of mind to answer these kinds of emails and stick with it and pile through a whole load there and then. It's the awareness of being on a roll and sticking with it. I've been doing that today with some success; this roll's been over three hours straight... *wipes eyes*

One thing I've realised from being ill is that there's just a desire for contact, the content of which is less important than the content. So, in a sense, screw it and write anything because it's better to get something than nothing. Besides who hasn't had the experience of handing in an essay and thinking it'll get panned and then getting a great mark for it, and vice versa. One's own perception of one's creation isn't all that hot, at least speaking for myself :-)

I dunno, what do you do?

Posted by Paul Makepeace at July 9, 2005 02:44 | TrackBack