Drowned in Emails? Just Drop Them!

We are constantly talking about multi-tasking and about how we sometimes absolutely have to do at least 3 things simultaneously to be able to do at least the largest part of our daily tasks on time. But even with this approach I often find myself leaving certain things still undone when closing my laptop at the end of the day (no matter how long after midnight it happens). And since I don’t think I am alone facing a pile of tasks that remain undone, I thought that it would not hurt to discuss if there are things that can grow overwhelming enough at some point to deserve leaving them out of that to-do list entirely.

I personally have a few things that I ignore most of the time already (unless I have some time that I don’t know what to do with - which unfortunately almost never happens) and after watching some other people I happen to communicate with I know that they also have things they ignore - and the irony is that these ignored things do not hurt their careers or businesses in any way.

Usually we begin to skip some tasks only when they actually turn into something totally unmanageable but if they can be ignored when we don’t have time for them, chances are they don’t deserve paying attention to from the very beginning - and leaving more time for things that truly matter. So here are some things that are usually a part of a daily routine for many web users and people working online that I have a feeling can be safely ignored - in full or at least to a certain extent.

Email

Email that becomes unmanageable is one of the worst things we happen to deal with online. There is no doubt email is great in that it allows you to communicate with anyone in any country of the world and often hope to get the answer relatively soon. Of course there are problems like spam but an average user must probably be pretty happy email exists as a means of communication - spam or no spam - as the comfort of being able to receive useful messages is more important than the discomfort of dealing with spam. But if you hold some position that requires substantial volume of communications, at some point the overloaded inbox might very well drive you crazy unless you know how to cope with messages that keep arriving at any moment of the day.

My own experience proves that there can be situations when handling your email properly - actually reading everything that you receive and reply to every message if the sender expects to hear back from you - will prevent you from doing lots of important things and can easily grow into almost the only task on your daily schedule.

I have once carried out a small experiment and ignored virtually all the emails except for those that arrive to the folder intended for very important messages for a whole week. Not that it was actually intentional - I just had too much urgent work to do that took some 12 hours per day and did not leave much time for anything beyond that. And you know what? Over the weekend when I have enough free time to sort everything out without new messages arriving every few minutes I simply sent replies to some of the relatively important messages offering my excuses for the late reply to some of the people. But nothing terrible happened and no one died because I did not have time to check all my emails for a week. I now have my own rule of only checking two important folders in my inbox to see if there is something important in there and avoiding everything else if I have actual work to do. Another important rule that usually helps is setting some time during the day when you are supposed to deal with the content of your inbox - once or twice per day - and forget about it until your next allowed time spot is here.

I am quite positive many people who are constantly attacked by endless incoming messages have some strategy of their own deciding how and when they will handle their emails. So now that I send emails to someone who I know must be under a great pressure of incoming emails, I rarely expect an answer soon unless it is something very important to this person as well. Only some people can afford to properly reply to every message they receive while others should only know how to deal with piles of emails without offending anyone. And generally if an email deserves a reply and is important to both the sender and the recipient, it will get the reply sooner than later.

Facebook messages

I remember when Facebook officially removed the students-only limitation, the geeky crowd around me quickly moved to Facebook and every technology blogger and internet celebrity seemed to arrive to the social network pretty soon. So it is no wonder that we had all those numerous blog posts discussing how suitable Facebook is for business and everyone bragging about how they checked their Facebook messages first thing in the morning instead of checking their emails as usually.

Of course this all looked a little childish and it was evident that this attitude will not last and we will turn to the appropriate communication means that we have used for ages now and have been pretty happy about. This is exactly what happened: everyone is settled back in our inboxes with some of the most urgent things handled on Twitter via direct messages (though already not very welcomed by many due to the same problem) while Facebook remained the place to exchange a quick message with a friend or mainly to keep track of what your friends are up to and leaving occasional comments about something particularly interesting. To tell you the truth, my own Facebook inbox is now pretty clean as I used the Christmas vacations to sort everything out. To my surprise, there were only a few messages that required attention while the vast majority of the huge pile I had there were only some notifications from the groups I belong to or products I am fan of announcing some news to me or just wishing me a happy new year. Of course it is nice to get some kind wishes now and then but it is certainly not a good reason to spend endless hours paying close attention to everything that lands in your Facebook inbox.

So after checking everything out I realized that while I did not really pay attention to dozens of unread messages in my Facebook inbox, I should not have worried about them as much as I did as people who actually need to hear back will most certainly find another - and safer - way to do that instead of hoping that yet another message on Facebook will be noticed. Especially since you can always see contact details for a friend easily and shoot an email to this person at no time which will probably still be more efficient than waiting for this person to find a few hours to sort out hundreds of unread Facebook messages.

The above points and rules are applicable to various other places where you receive incoming messages - be it @ replies or direct messages on Twitter or incoming messages on MyBlogLog - the major idea is to learn that not every message that you receive should deserve a reply if you don’t even have time for such a reply or if such replies prevent you from actually doing work you make a living with.

Bacn messages

Bacn is a fairly new phenomenon: this new term describes all the emails that you get as notifications from various social networks and online services. They are generated automatically and their purpose is to inform you of some events that happened around your social networking presence - be it a new friend or a new direct message or whatever functionality you are supposed to be informed of. Of course these emails can be useful as they allow you to keep reasonable presence on such social networks and they also don’t let you forget about the services you could easily forget about otherwise. But the problem with them is quite obvious: they arrive in dozens or hundreds (depending on how active you are in social networking and how active the people around you are as well) and they take place in your inbox and time to sort them out and see who you need to follow back and who you will need to reply to as well.

I’ve been trying to deal with all such messages as soon as they arrived for quite a while and I now know this is the most unproductive activity of all as people hardly sit and wait for you to immediately follow them back on Twitter or add them as friends on Facebook. Here the solution is dead-simple: create a separate folder for Bacn messages in your inbox and choose some suitable time to look through it. It may be the time when you are already tired enough not to want to do anything serious but clicking some links and sharing a few light messages may be just the right activity. What’s more, I personally have found out that all these emails can be addressed to not very frequently - only once o twice a week works fine for me at least - to let you have time for something that actually matters.

Reading everything that arrives to your feed reader

And finally on of the heaviest burdens of all: numerous posts in your feed reader. I’ve already seen many people complaining about their inability to ever leave Google Reader with unread items at zero no matter how hard they try to do just that - for lack of time combined with too many subscriptions to keep an eye on all of them properly. Yet these people still are very much unwilling to use the “Mark all as read” function as they feel that there may be something very important they will miss. Yet leaving items unread bothers them as well as they feel there must be something important in there that they are already missing.

My own personal solution here is relying heavily on folders. Everything that I am subscribed to (and I am subscribed to many feeds as I need to track the latest news from direct sources, other bloggers, mainstream media publications and I also have many friends I want to be subscribed to - not to mention tracking some photos on Flickr and also subscribing to feeds from Russian-language news sources as well). Of course this number of RSS feeds could quickly generate an overwhelming number of unread items - if not for the folders.

I prefer to invest some time deciding where each new subscription should go and keep everything sorted out from the very beginning than have to deal with the guilt of leaving a mess of unread messages. Of course these folders are formed based on the priorities of content in them with some of the feeds being the most important ones (read as soon as something new arrives), others simply aggregating news from general sources (can easily be marked as read after some time passes), yet others not very urgent but a must-read (these I can read whenever I have time for them). In this manner I can easily determine what to read and what to ignore without having any concerns I could miss something important. Besides, there is one advantage of living in the echo chamber that the technology blogosphere is: knowing that you will never miss news if it’s really important as it will be repeated everywhere and will reach you via this or that channel anyway.

Now I can officially admit: I do know that I can miss something important unread and I can sometimes miss a new startup by ignoring the spam folder in my Outlook instead of checking everything out carefully in case something important has been sorted out as spam. But I know for sure that truly important things are hard to miss and people who need to reach me with their messages will do it anyway by sending such messages via a couple of channels. After all, I know that there are things that are way more important - like doing some writing here - and not having enough time for them because I am drowned in emails will be what will really deserves to feel guilty about. So what are your online tasks that you ignore and don’t even feel guilty about?

[Images by Justin, cogdogblog, and Trevor Manternach on Flickr.]