Tyranny of an open Inbox
I must admit i’ve been struggling with information overload recently. An open Inbox makes it even worse since you know that whatever that’s inside the mailbox is still an outstanding issue. Outstanding issues continue to fester in my mind over and over again. It’s getting tiring. Last week I spent so many coffee induced 4-5hr sessions of pure concentration just to clear my inbox and ended up sending out easily 400 email replies over the course of 4-5 days. Yet I’m still not done with clearing my Inbox!The writings of Timothy Ferris and how he tackles email overload became vividly clear to me. I thought I could handle it but I really couldn’t.The first thing I need to do is to recognize that I have a problem with information overload in my life. The next thing I also recognize is that I’m an information bottleneck to others. I’ve become the Router that just can’t handle the things coming my way and sending them out to people who need it fast enough. Somehow, I’ve become the ultimate decision maker whom many people depend upon to get things to work. It’s a good problem I guess but it’s really taxing for me. During a work day, my life turns into something like that of a trader. I get smses, calls, requests, visits, emails nearly every other minute. I thought I could context switch very well. And I still can. But the fact is, at the end of the day, the context switching drains me out so much that I can’t get anything done. The ‘anything’ here refers to stuff with substantial creative or intellectual input such as writing a quotation, proposal or contract that are necessary documents in the business world. I’m really sorry to everyone whom I’ve been delaying getting stuff out to. Really appreciate your patience. I’m taking great steps to figure out how can this be improved.These are a few things that I’ve been working on:1. Clearing out my inbox asap. -> Shifting things to a todolist instead of leaving them in the inbox.2. Checking it less often so that I can focus more on stuff.3. Going offline more often  so that I can have full periods of concentrating.4. Enabling my co-workers to act. Still trying to figure out the best way to empower as much as possible.Hiya, growing pains… Will be solved with perseverance! Â
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I used to receive about 150 email a day. So I did the following:
1) Advise my staff that I will have a one hour operations meeting with them everyday. So they only need to Cc me for important email that they send to the bosses and need not Cc me in every single email they send out.
2) Inform my co-workers that we will meet up for a one hour meeting every week, so something do not need to Cc me.
3) Delegate. I decided to empower my staff operational responsibilities. They only need to inform me of their decisions, problems and outcome.
4) For simple email that can be settled over the phone, just cut and paste a standard reply “Please call/ see me”. This send a clear signal to people to use the phone more often.
This reduced my email to about 40 per day. So far so good.
Good luck!