My Digital Life – Series II
So some background. I’m sitting here on two 23″ monitors with text all over trying in vain to assemble my life into a collection of documents that sums up why I am a basket case stress monkey.
In the time that has passed since the last series I wrote on this, I have had a lot of things happen:
1) I bought a house. This is by far the most stressful process I have ever done in my entire life.
2) I got promoted, and with that a lot of responsibilities put on my plate as priorities that were “pet” projects before.
3) We renovated that new house, which meant living out of a suitcase in various places for the better part of two months.
Here is the consequence of the good news:
1) My e-mail load has increased. Yes. Increased. As a part of my growth at work I have implemented more systems in place to handle the influx of traffic in terms of projects, etc. Part of that has increased written communication.
Today’s e-mail stats (and I deleted about 100) – 253 messages, all actionable. That’s crazy people. My Blackberry “pings” everytime I get e-mail. In an eight hour day, that means I get e-mail once every 1.9 minutes.
KILL ME
2) My plate has filled. I don’t know a better way to put it. When I sit down, and in the GTD fashion write down all the things in my noggin so far as occupying elements of my time, or things I have to work on, it fills PAGES. And each is a priority. This extends from work to house stuff.
3) My data organization needs are outpacing software to manage it. This has caused problems. I switched from Yojimbo to Voodoo pad, because I thought a Wiki would help. It didn’t. My RSS situation sits at 600 feeds which I read and try to follow up with.
4) My devices have migrated and thus workflow adjusted.
and finally
5) I now live less than a mile from work, which has radically changed my point of view in terms of the work/home dichotomy.
Here is how I want to break this down:
Part I – The Landscape Basically going over the current crop of tools including home, work and mobile
Part II – Internal Communication How my devices, tools and systems communicate
Part III – Information How I deal with the information glut
Part IV – External Communication How I manage communication through blog, e-mail and other tools
I want to make it a point to not do Digg-bait “Top 10″ simple answers to these issues. I face a complex situation, which I think a lot of people have. So maybe this will help?
I also want to make this two-way, as I don’t think I have all the answers.
Sound cool? Tomorrow I’m going to start on the Landscape, as that’ll take a bit.
Your last “My So Called Digital Life” series rocked, I’m excited about this new series. Keep up the good work…and keep kicking ass with those emails, ouch dude EVERY 1.9 MINUTES!
As I seem to suffer almost the exact same maladies as you, I await Volume II with great anticipation.
I am really looking foward to the part about figuring out how to get only the really important emails on your phone. That was a section…right?
BTW… Volume I = great read.
Cheers.
A person who receieves actionable 253 emails a day.
- has failed to organize his mental workspace rather severely.
- works in an organization that obviously lacks organizing and strategies to handle these issues. Badly.
- is clearly underperforming in terms of work tasks, compared to how he would perform under more well-organized conditions.
In conclusion, talking about how many emails you receieve a day only shows that the person is underperforming, somewhat imcopetent when it comes to organizational and communicative structures and working in a troublefilled organization. I don’t understand why anyone would want the world to know about these rather personal failures.
/Bingo
Hi there. When did you start sitting in my office?
Unfortunately, while your points are valid, they don’t apply in this circumstance. Getting 300 to 500 actionable e-mails in a day in a RECORD COMPANY where I work means that we’re doing a good job at what we do. Our business necessitates rapid fire communication between lots of people. We are run extremely horizontally and without attention to hierarchy, which means that on any given thing, there are a lot of voices coming to agreement. Nothing (usually) sits in senior VP level discussions.
>Getting 300 to 500 actionable e-mails in a day in a >RECORD COMPANY where I work means that we’re doing a good >job at what we do.
I beg to differ:
>Our business necessitates rapid fire communication >between lots of people.
An email amount such as the one you mentioned clearly hinders such a goal.
>We are run extremely horizontally and without attention >to hierarchy, which means that on any given thing, there >are a lot of voices coming to agreement.
If this organizational strategy creats 3-500 actionable email for some sort of mid-level employee, the strategy creates more problems than it solves.
Besides the fact that telling the world about the enormous amounts of email you receieve is very 1999, I believe there are clear organizational problems in terms of communication when such a thing occurs. In 1999 it might have been a sign of high tempo in your business, in 2006 it means a badly managed communication strategy.
Given this, I’m not sure what you mean by your initial statement:
>Getting 300 to 500 actionable e-mails in a day in a >RECORD COMPANY where I work means that we’re doing a good >job at what we do.
This would imply that the communication comes from outside of the company, I guess. No matter what they relate to, they give the impression that any small issue requires long email conversations. If not, you are obviously understaffed. And if they do come from within the organization, the above-mentioned description applies, in my mind.
Not putting you down, simply trying to point out what severe problems the desribed situation implies.
/Bingo
While that to some extent might be good thing (if there
Bingo,
While I admire the points you make, and wish I could control my clients to not be so verbose, having a large quantity of actionable items is not a bad thing. Similar to Ethan, those communications are usually requests to get something done. Now, eventhough I might not be the one doing the work, at some point I still need to perform some action on them be it reply immediately, delegate, mark for followup, or any of the other GTD items.
I wish I could say it was an issue of staffing. We have plenty of staff, but someone still needs to play conductor to the band. To keep the company A-profitable and B-properly managed dealing with the communication is part of the territory.
Cheers.
Have you since gone back to Yojimbo, or have you moved on to something else?
Well, Jeff Cohone does raise some possible relevant points I guess. But to claim that many “actionable items” require you to simple delegate the task, is clearly an example of bad organization.
Noone is doing the best level of work possible if they’re handling 300 emails a day, unless ALL THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO is handling incoming email with brief responses or the like.
I am mainly surprised by three things:
That Warner Bros. accepts that an employee in effect tells a story of crap organization within the company.
That anyone would like to have it known that they work in such an organization, much less talk about in in their blog.
That the shame of being badly organized doesn’t overtake the weird 1999 style boasting about the number of emails receieved.
Enjoy your day, in case you even have time to read this.
/Bingo
You are just Mr. Negative McFussypants.
For the record:
WBR is an amazingly well run company. Its a record company, and the fact that I get a lot of e-mail and am doing a lot of things is GOOD. Not BAD.
The point of this whole series was that I was at dinner w/ Merlin Mann and he noticed my PocketPC/Smartphone device kept dinging, so I told him why. Hence I wrote the last series. Its about HOW to manage an influx of information.
Thte fact is, that I work in a very large, very well run and chaotic organization that is CHAOTIC BY DESIGN. The fact also remains I have a lot of my own projects (Murmurs, etc) that I work on that take up time/energy as well.
You judging the company I work for is rather stupid. Like I said: I never saw you at my office, in our meetings, etc. Have you ever worked in a CREATIVE organization? One that’s beginning and end product was a piece of cultural art? Probably not, so don’t be so quick to judge for fucks sake.
Now on with the series. I’m working on part I.
My 300 e-mails a day are not BAD. It is a lot to handle. If that number ever dipped to 20 or so, something is seriously wrong.
I have absolutely no trouble believing that Ethan’s work is both well-run and covered in e-mail.
I used to work in the film industry and my old boss (okay, my boss’s boss), ran one of the best-run producer shops in Hollywood and he easily fielded 500 phone calls a day(seriously, I’m not kidding). It is not a staffing problem — he had three assistants — that is just how businesses like the movie and music studios work.
That said, I do not field anywhere near that many e-mails a day (I am now a journalist — my problem is getting people to call me back) and I still have trouble keeping my head above the digital water.
I am really excited to see how someone else keeps it all under control and remains productive.
Thanks Ethan!
N.