Company Memo with Basic E-Mail Management Suggestions?

February 16, 2005 1:45 PM

A few years back, a company (Intel, perhaps?) put out a basic memo on how to manage your email. Nothing earth shattering or complicated, but just basic, simple suggestions. I used to have a copy, and now I can't find it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about, and can point me to a copy of it?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Five Fast Email Suggestions - 43 Folders

via kottke today - not from a big company... but useful i guess.
posted by muddylemon at 1:49 PM on February 16, 2005

Mark Hurst has a nice system that I often recommend to people:

Good Experience: E-mail Management Report, Reducing E-mail Overload
posted by merlinmann at 2:23 PM on February 16, 2005

Those are great suggestions. In fact I already do what's in them, and my work+home e-mail inboxes have a combined one e-mail in them right now. The problem is I can't seem to stop checking my e-mail every 60 seconds. I can't wait to get another e-mail. It's compulsive behavior, I know. Any tips?

In my work environment, people are frequently expected to respond to e-mails right away (hey, your scripts are about to make 1000 nodes of the compute farm fail, do something quick), so not getting to an e-mail right away can be perilous.
posted by grouse at 2:47 PM on February 16, 2005

Get an email indicator that informs you when you have new mail. Interrupt driven is better than polling.
posted by fvw at 4:47 PM on February 16, 2005

suggestions for poster:

like fvw said, start checking your email because your notifier dinged, not because you felt like it. along with that, change your email preferences to "check every 10/15/20" minutes (maybe start low, then work your way up as you wean yourself from obsession)

suggestion for grouse:
talk your IT department into installing a jabber server. it requires a bit of education to train people that important, time-sensitive things are for jabber, and other things are for email (and vice versa), but it's worth it to not have to check your email every 30 seconds just in case it's important.

of course, then you get people jabbering you things that aren't even important enough for an email... but hey. tradeoffs.
posted by bobot at 6:51 PM on February 16, 2005

NMRN: Was it Managing E-Mail Overload, a September 2000 report by Ferris Research? Since that's a pay link, here's a PC World summary.
posted by dhartung at 11:47 PM on February 16, 2005

dhartung, I think that's the one. Thanks!

(These guys were complaining that our email was going to be bad in 2002? If they saw my 2004, they'd run back to 2002 to cower and hide!)
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:03 AM on February 17, 2005