Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

You two are talking about completely different things.

There's no 'on call' for the kind of projects that parent is talking about. There's a small handful of guys who get shit done and maybe a second ring development team around them.

For some people, the truly exciting work is the work where none of this stuff has been proceduralized. It's not feasible to train or do knowledge transfer between two shifts for these projects.

It's not a UK thing, it's a company thing. For billable companies like legal and accounting, you are more likely to bill hours wherever you are. For most others, it is "up to you" if you want to do work outside of paid hours but if you don't, maybe you won't keep up, maybe the boss won't like you etc.

The question I often ask clients is, are they busy doing other people's work from their mobile emails?

Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a lot more answering.

Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created it - there was no structure and framework around email use.

I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the questions, often on their own time to keep up.

How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly, or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the organization is truly-proactive.

Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity:

- Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is important.

- The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate with.

- I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as possible.

- Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the night before.

- The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending.

- Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3 times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack. Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input.

I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their email flow.

At least in a startup environment, the bus factor risk isn't even on the same order of magnitude as much more tangible stuff like the client walking away. Doubling your labor costs to mitigate a risk that doesn't make the top 3 is just bad business. Sometimes it's not even an option.

You make a deal with your #1s that they will get the fun projects, the paid vacations when the current crisis is over, the completely flexible hours and full autonomy. Anything they want within reason, as long as shit gets done.

It's not for everyone, but I can see where GP is coming from.

> People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients.

"Demanding clients" often respond positively to articulated, practiced boundaries. I'd be unimpressed with a project lead who simply allowed their client to set the rules. I expect the lead to know what's best for the project/team and to have the skills to communicate that to the client in a way they understand. We like the clients who "know the rules" implicitly, but that doesn't mean the others can't come to learn them.

The rare clients who really are so demanding that you can't even establish a boundary like this is probably dragging a whole fleet of problems behind them.

[And if you need to be available off-hours because that's what the project needs, that's different. Then it has nothing to do with how "demanding" the client is. It's the project that's setting the terms.]