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Brick No151: What's Wrong With Your Inbox?
By Matt Weston, Thursday 14 July 2005 What's Wrong With Your Inbox? It's not your fault, but I have an inbox problem. I just got back from a two-week hiatus (as mentioned in Brick No150). A few days in Italy - eating olives from the grove. And, before that, ten days knocking out and putting in my kitchen - fitting greasy brass olives to pipe. Italy was better, si. (198 photos of the place we stayed, the best 179 of which weren't taken by me - or anyone I know.) The big change from the last time I took a break is that I have a lot more email to answer nowadays. And it troubles me that many people are sending me thoughtful emails that I take ages to reply to. When I checked yesterday, my inbox was chock full of your replies to Brick No150, "Networking Is Broken", and, of course, all the "are you ok?" messages from friends after what happened in this city last Thursday. (Oh, and 65 emails from people telling me to put I C E in my mobile.) How to deal with spam A paragraph on spam - Spam is (relatively) easy to deal with. It's the legitimate emails you get that you need to worry about. If dealing with spam takes you more time than dealing with legitimate email, try I swear by a cheap spam cop application called SpamSieve (Mac OSX only). What you're really looking for is something that learns from experience. Like a Tamagotchi. You feed it spam and non-spam, and tell it when it makes a mistake. I've trained mine to 99.4% accuracy, with very few "false positives". And it picks up an average of 60 spams a day. How to deal with non-spam Spam cop or no, I have an inbox problem. And it's the solicited, legitimate, thoughtful emails that I want to deal with better. It goes with the turf I guess: as your small business grows, so does your inbox. But far from wanting less mail, I want more! The more feedback I read (analysis not opinion, please), the less Business Bricks operates in a vacuum. Two ways to fix this problem (and the first, at least, you can borrow to use on your own small business): (1) Keep Your Inbox Empty Join me in an inbox experiment. I downloaded Mark Hurst's fr*e PDF, "Managing Incoming Email", and am going to follow pages 7-16 to the letter. To keep with the experiment, you need to do the same. The problem isn't with software, or too much email. It's with the way we think of the inbox. It turns out I use my inbox in ways it was never intended for: as a to-do list, filing system, calendar, bookmarks list, and address book. Instead I should keep my inbox empty, like an intray. And instead of 6,744 messages in my inbox, I should have no more than a handful. (MH even uses the 80's arcade game Tapper to explain why his method works.) (2) A New Way To Give Feedback Another experiment. If I could print all the feedback I get in reply to Business Bricks, I would. What I do use is only ever the very tip of the iceberg. It troubles me that so much useful thought lies expecting a reply, and that I rarely get to share it with the rest of you. So let's try something new. Instead of emailing your on-topic comments one-to-one to me, post them, one-to-everyone, on this page (NOW CLOSED, SORRY). A few double yellow lines: 1. Disagree by all means, but don't get lairy. 2. Keep on-topic. If you've got something specific to say about the Brick, say it. If it's something general, better to drop me an email to the usual address. 3. If you make a comment, by all means include a link to your website at the bottom. (Make sure you prefix it with http:// or it won't work.) But don't use this as a chance to plug your site without contributing anything useful. That's spam in my book. And it's not big and won't work. But, that apart, over to you. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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