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Why time management is ruining our lives

theguardian.com

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Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#61

Post by ryandrake »

I've never actually achieved Zero Inbox, but I'm pretty close. One thing that helps is to create meaningful, actionable folders for your E-mails. I have these:

    Urgent: Follow-up today in person
    Follow-up today by E-mail
    Follow-up this week
    Waiting for non-urgent response
    Hound (for people who take constant babysitting, I'll send request daily until it's responded to)
    Watch (if thread is replied to, I'll need to be on it)
    Archive (all resolved items)
    Ignored (no interest to me and no response needed)
I've got a few others but these are the ones I use the most. My workflow is to skim my new messages. Reply to the ones that can be quickly addressed, and file the rest into these folders to be reviewed at an appropriate time (generally by EOD).

I try to address all questions to me by EOD before I let myself go home. Because I don't like That Guy Who Doesn't Respond To E-mails, I try to set a good example and not be that guy.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#62

Post by pmichaud »

ryandrake wrote: post #53
rdiddly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so you're one of those folks who doesn't answer my emails! Makes me pester you multiple times, by email, SMS, Skype, and if I'm truly desperate, the dog park. You're just outsourcing the work of communication onto me. When you ask for a favor I will pretend I didn't hear it! Winky emoticon.

Thank you for pointing that out. Not answering one's E-mail is on my list of "rude things that somehow have become acceptable". It's part of individual companies' cultures. I've worked places where people can generally be relied upon to get back to you, and places where you might as well print out the message and shred it--it's not going to be responded to. The former means your working relationship with me is going…

I like your tactical suggestion at the bottom, but I wanted to say that I rankle at the top.

Philosophically, I don't think a request for my attention creates an obligation to give it.

Practically, if I responded to every email I received, I'd spend all my time doing nothing but responding to email, then I'd still fail by running out of time.

It's actually pretty stressful. I've outsourced a lot of my email to a couple people who work for me, but there are still some that just go unanswered because the system isn't airtight. But it feels unfair to impugn me as rude for not being able to do a thing that becomes impractical to do at a certain point.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#63

Post by debt »

andyidsinga wrote: post #12

I suspect that the notion of managing one's inbox creates a sort of kruger-dunning effect with the inbox owner in terms of perceived productivity. I've given up active or structured management of my inbox : I read a few times during the work day, try to keep up, but don't get worried about missing 40% of things that come through. I'm at-ease with the notion that important communications have a way of finding me (emai…

Management is not in your future.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#64

Post by coldcode »

At work it is routine for people to create long phone meetings, invite 50 people who all are expected to be online, talk for hour with no decision, plan another meeting for later to talk about it again. People only show up because if they don't they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong which will spawn more unpleasant meetings. The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers, but the end result is massive wastage of time where no one can get any work done. Because no work is accomplished, more meetings must be held to decide what to do to fix it. Of course as a programmer I am expected to get everything done within a small window of time which of course doesn't include all the meetings, so I have to be masterful of what time I have to avoid being called into meetings about why I didn't get things done on time.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#65

Post by hinkley »

jimmaswell wrote: post #54
andyidsinga wrote: post #12

I suspect that the notion of managing one's inbox creates a sort of kruger-dunning effect with the inbox owner in terms of perceived productivity. I've given up active or structured management of my inbox : I read a few times during the work day, try to keep up, but don't get worried about missing 40% of things that come through. I'm at-ease with the notion that important communications have a way of finding me (emai…

Why not just set up phone notifications and deal with emails as they come in when you happen to use your phone? You never miss anything that way. Works great in my experience.

I have a friend who believes this way. If he doesn't stop telegraphing that literally every other distraction in the world is more important than me, we're not going to be friends much longer.

My boss at one company would call meetings with an agenda that he set and then step out of the meeting to answer phone calls from his boss. Then six or eight of us sat around trying to figure out what to talk about without him not there. Tremendous waste of time. Several man hours per incident. And if not for that personality flaw I would have called him a good boss.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#67

Post by confounded »

rdiddly wrote: post #48
moxious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure all of your communications are so critical? There are also people who will chase others to the dog park to tell them that a CI build passed...

That last example sounds like someone incompetent at email and choosing teammates, chose one who's incompetent at deciding what's critical. Oops-a-daisy. For competent adults, having the recipient unilaterally decide what's critical (critical to whom? being a key question) is insulting.

Damned autonomy, damned free-will!

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#68

Post by duaneb »

coldcode wrote: post #64

At work it is routine for people to create long phone meetings, invite 50 people who all are expected to be online, talk for hour with no decision, plan another meeting for later to talk about it again. People only show up because if they don't they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong which will spawn more unpleasant meetings. The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two…

> The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers

In my experience, those two programmers rarely have a good enough understanding of existing codebase and momentum to make good decisions. Without meetings, there is little way to avoid these problems.

Programmers are good at implementation, not (necessarily) decision making.

Also, meetings only make sense if everyone is focused on decision making; this is a company culture issue more than anything.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#69

Post by gedy »

coldcode wrote: post #64

At work it is routine for people to create long phone meetings, invite 50 people who all are expected to be online, talk for hour with no decision, plan another meeting for later to talk about it again. People only show up because if they don't they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong which will spawn more unpleasant meetings. The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two…

Those who can, do. Those who can't, talk.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#70

Post by BN1978 »

ryandrake wrote: post #61

I've never actually achieved Zero Inbox, but I'm pretty close. One thing that helps is to create meaningful, actionable folders for your E-mails. I have these: Urgent: Follow-up today in person Follow-up today by E-mail Follow-up this week Waiting for non-urgent response Hound (for people who take constant babysitting, I'll send request daily until it's responded to) Watch (if thread is replied to, I'll need to be on…

I like your system for emails. You inspired me to do add to my Trello list: "Try ryandrake system for my inbox."
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