Well, my new Renaissance training gave me a new homework assignment yesterday. It was to start optimizing my email account. the idea is that email should NOT be my to-do list. The idea is first, you unsubscribe from everything possible. if you don’t need it, or don’t read, stop it from ever hitting your inbox. This is the first step in getting control of your inbox. I did a while ago, so more or less, this was under control for me.
Now this next part is where the challenge came for me. In fact, it’s a bit of an on-going experiment. The idea is to shift as many emails out of the inbox as possible without ever touching them. This is REALLY useful for me. I tend to use my inbox as another to-do list. So, every time a new email goes into my inbox, I either need to let it sit there on the list until I do action it, or I need to stop what I”m doing and either read it, delete it, move it, or whatever. This exercise is the next step in clearing out the inbox.
I use MS Outlook, so it has built in rules. Now the challenge is that for every email that comes in, I have to train my inbox with how to deal with it. It’s funny, the machine learning stuff I’m doing falls into this exercise. So every time a new email comes into my inbox, I need to look at it and decide what should happen (this is just like real life). The switch comes that I’m writing a rule now to handle it for me automatically. So I can look at certain addresses, certain words in the subject, or whatever I can do to try to identify the emails. Now, this is rather time consuming, but much like my first exercise in unsubscribing, every email make my life a little easier. Now, new emails show up in folders that don’t instantly distract me. I have to periodically scroll through my folders to see if any unread emails are in there. Then check on the folders from time to time. This of course means my rules keep getting a little better with each email I check. I highly recommend this exercise. it’s already reduced my inbox to a handful of emails that I need to action. The rest sit there until I’m ready to look at them. if your inbox is out of control, this will make a huge difference to make sure that you focus on critical things first, and the fluff stuff later.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike