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PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

pragdave.blogs.pragprog.com

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Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#61

Post by otoburb »

officemonkey wrote: post #58
xonev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man - I'd love to see how she'd react to the knowledge that she is being conditioned.

He's the one who is responding to her promptly. Methinks he's the one being conditioned.

No, he's already conditioned himself to answer certain "high-priority" emails quickly while responding with high latency to voicemails.

His girlfriend who will be more likely to change her behaviour in response to this exercise, rather than him (i.e. he's already conditioned himself).

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#63

Post by hollerith »

pyre wrote: post #59
hollerith wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hell, by the time you've switched context, you might as well read the article: your concentration is shot. Ten seconds of scanning an email header might take five or ten minutes to recover from. I read email only once or twice a day and have turned off all email notifications, which eliminates this objection to email. Footnote: "turned off all email notifications": exception: I set procmail to play some music whenev…

I'd love to see what your procmail setup is like.

Easy enough for me to show you. The relevant recipe is as follows. The c means make a copy of the message, i.e., keep going even if the rule is a hit. The h means save or pipe only the headers. /usr/bin/afplay is specific to OS X.

  :0
  *^from:.*persephone
  {
      :0 c:
      $DEFAULT

      :0 h
      | /usr/bin/afplay --time 6.2 /o/music/live_at_leeds_2/16_miracle_cure.mp3
  }

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#64

Post by mikeleeorg »

I had attended a workshop on time management several years ago, and one of the suggestions was to delete your entire inbox when you return from vacation. The theory was that if something was truly urgent, that person would track you down. If not, it may have already gotten resolved and there's no need to hear about it - a quick status update from your team could be enough.

I've done this several times and it's always worked out well. It's funny how issues that people think are urgent sometimes resolve themselves.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#65

Post by gcb »

unalone wrote: post #37
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

In the late 1990s I worked for a large government agency as part of a job that employed over 1200 contractors (Welcome to government work.) Each day I'd get incredible amounts of email -- most of which was completely useless to me. Before I left, I asked if I could form a small team and take part in a 2-3 month project. They had initially planned on a team of 20, but I felt that small teams, left alone and working in…

> Of course, there's also the fact that people email/IM/FB others simply because they can, whether they have anything of import to say or not. You'd think twice if you had to walk over to somebody's cube to show them a picture of a cat, but you wouldn't blink an eye to post an article with the same content to 100 people on FB. Daniel, thanks for talking about this, because it's made me realize how different people's…

IM for me is as asynchronous as email. It will never interrupt me like, say a phone call.

But my IM client will be open almost 24h

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#66

Post by pavel_lishin »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

In the late 1990s I worked for a large government agency as part of a job that employed over 1200 contractors (Welcome to government work.) Each day I'd get incredible amounts of email -- most of which was completely useless to me. Before I left, I asked if I could form a small team and take part in a 2-3 month project. They had initially planned on a team of 20, but I felt that small teams, left alone and working in…

> The email from HR with the monthly newsletter has the same ability to disrupt your day as the email from your accountant telling you some terribly important financial news.

Was this before things like automatic filters existed?

Not every e-mail has the same interrupting power in my gmail account. Anything in my "notifications" folder is something that can wait a week. Anything in "receipts" is probably just Amazon reminding me that I bought something. "facebook" can basically be completely wiped once a day without any glaring loss.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#67

Post by damoncali »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #50
damoncali wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a similar environment once (Large government contractor on a NASA program). There was lots of cube-walking, and generally, it is a distraction. BUT- You know that when you walk into someone's cube to ask them a question, it will be a bit of a distraction and it takes a little effort, so you make sure you need to before you do. Similarly, when someone walks into your cube, you know they think it is more im…

I think that works with other developers who understands how interrupting someone in the middle of coding is a big deal, but I've worked with PMs and QA people who didn't get the message that asking 4 or 5 questions a day is not cool. Personally I prefer email for this reason. Too often I've seen coworkers who become "the guy who helps". The guy doesn't say no, who answers questions that have nothing to do with their…

True. And there is also the guy who does nothing but wander between cubes, chatting about nothing. More of a government thing than a startup thing, to be sure. But it puts a cramp in the system.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#68

Post by dredmorbius »

This is similar to Linus Torvalds's (former?) practice of "dropping patches" in response to overload.

It's actually not a bad queue management process overall. Local processor offline / overloaded? Drop all but the very highest priority (for email: immediate family, $BOSS) messages.

The late Joe Barr describes this obliquely in his discussion of the development of BitKeeper (git's predecessor as the Linux kernel code repository): http://joebarr.sys-con.com/node/32618/mobile

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#69

Post by mhartl »

I did something similar on a recent six-week international trip. I set up a dedicated "urgent" account (urgent@mydomain.com) and put an autoresponder on my primary account telling people I was out of the country, with instructions to send their message to the urgent account if the message was indeed urgent. I checked my primary account a couple of times during the six weeks, and handled a couple of things that needed to be dealt with (e.g., the expiration of the UPS box where all my mail was being forwarded), but otherwise I restricted myself to the urgent account. When I got back, I went through my main inbox, but it only took an hour or so and I wasn't overwhelmed by the results.

Re: PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

#70

Post by notatoad »

csallen wrote: post #13
Legion wrote: post #9

Interesting idea, but I highly dislike it. The entire point of email is that it is the "leave a message and I'll get back to you" mode of communication for the Internet. It is not the "respond right now" mode - that is what IM and chat rooms and other real-time communications are. I have things to do too, you know, and keeping track of someone else's schedule in order to be able to send them an email isn't on the lis…

> The whole point of email is that I can send on my schedule, and you can read it on yours. A major cause of email overload is that senders don't respect the "you can read it on yours" part of that statement. Instead, they send emails requesting info that they need to act on within a specific window of time (usually hours or days). This implicitly assigns recipients a time limit, because responding too late would be…

they send emails expecting an immediate response because they know you will respond immediately. i respond to emails within 24hrs. people know this, and don't expect anything faster. if somebody does expect a faster response, that's too bad. you need to reassess your understanding of rude and manage people's expectations of you. if somebody expects me to interrupt what i'm doing to answer their email, that's rude of them.

if anybody requires an urgent response from me, they can try a synchronous method of communication. in the meantime, i've got things to do.

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