{"id":6023,"date":"2015-02-09T08:52:28","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T07:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=6023"},"modified":"2015-02-12T14:12:11","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T13:12:11","slug":"permanent-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2015\/02\/09\/permanent-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"Permanent Zero"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Email overload’ is one of those phrases everyone thinks they know the meaning of: “I get too many emails!”. Last autumn I met Steve Whittaker<\/a>, who has a reasonable claim to have actually coined the phrase, way back in 1996<\/a>. He explained to me that the point wasn’t to say that we get to much email, but that email is used for too many different things. We’re using it to send messages, receive messages, get notifications, schedule tasks, chat, delegate tasks, archive information and so on forever. <\/p>\n

Shifting the focus from email as number of individual messages (too many!), to email as functions (still too many!) lets you see why the ‘Inbox Zero<\/a>‘ idea doesn’t quite work. Inbox Zero appeals to my sense of being in control over my email, and it is better for me than not having a righteous scheduling system for my email, but it doesn’t split the multiple functions for which I use email.<\/p>\n

Now, for you today, I’d like to share my newest strategy for managing my email, which is inspired by Whittaker’s ‘Email overload’ distinction.<\/p>\n

The first thing to do is to separate off the single largest function of email – receiving messages – from the others. You need to stop emails arriving in your inbox, leaving you free to send and search without distraction. Create a filter and have all incoming mail moved to that folder. Now stare in satisfaction at “You have no new email!” in your inbox. Schedule a time to go to your received mail folder and kill as many emails as you can, using your favourite inbox zero strategies (protop: if you send emails at 4.30 you minimise the chances of someone replying that day). Now your workflow which only involves sending messages and dealing with old messages isn’t tangled up with the distraction of receiving new messages.<\/p>\n

Next, separate off all email that isn’t personal correspondence. Set a second filter which removes all email without your email address in the ‘to’ or ‘cc’ fields. These are circulars. You can scan the titles and delete en mass.<\/p>\n

If you are using gmail, you can import these filters (after editing to make relevant adjustments).
\n– remove from inbox, unless sent to ‘exception’ address<\/a>
\n– remove all circulars<\/a>
\nRight click to ‘save as’, they won’t show up in a browser. Note that my new folders begin with ‘A_’ so they are top of my alphabetised folder list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Email overload’ is one of those phrases everyone thinks they know the meaning of: “I get too many emails!”. Last autumn I met Steve Whittaker, who has a reasonable claim to have actually coined the phrase, way back in 1996. He explained to me that the point wasn’t to say that we get to much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectual-self-defence","category-technical-notes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-1z9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6023"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6025,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6023\/revisions\/6025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}