Last week, I came accross this website from Nathan Zeldes, who has some very interesting approaches to reduce our daily information overload dilemma. The story begins with some simple tips how to deal with email (see http://www.nathanzeldes.com/productivity-tips/):
(1) “Only read incoming mail in a few fixed time slots daily.”
(2) “Turn off all incoming email alerts.”
(3) “Never use your Inbox as a To Do list.”
(4) “Nathan’s ‘Five Weeks’ folder method.” In fact, this tip says that “we need to delete decisively”, but we can’t in some cases. So, make a folder called “Five Weeks”, move mesages of this type into this new folder and “make its auto-archiving behavior ‘delete any message older than 5 weeks’”.
For details please have a look at Nathan Zeldes’ blog post “Email Productivity Tips. Ideas you can use NOW to make your life better!” (see http://www.nathanzeldes.com/productivity-tips/).
Another question is, wether we really want to reduce our email traffic (do we?). I follow Nathan’s statement, that “it’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma. No one wants there to be more emails; yet nobody wants to be the first to send less of them.” (see http://www.nathanzeldes.com).
In fact, we live in a “Culture of Information Overload“. It’s not a technical, but rather a cultural problem of our generation. In this culture, people want to impress others, show that they are responsive, and people want to track their own workload. But email is not the right software hammer to handle this kind of nails (referring to Abraham H. Maslow).