Here’s tips 1 through 4:
- I turned off the auto-notice in Outlook. This means I will not be distracted by popups and little sounds telling me there is a new problem until I am ready to focus on them. This really is Email Survival 101. (LifeHacker - Turn off Outlook Alerts)
- I started to track my daily activities:
- I’m using my own version of the Emergent Task Planner (from David Seah), and each day begins by identifying my Most Important Tasks (MITs), and listing my appointments.
- Each day ends with a Daily Review of what I accomplished and need to do next. I’ve found that when I skip this small action, I’m running to catch up the rest of the week.
- Copying the unfinished tasks to a new Planner sheet wasted a lot of time, so I worked this into my Things To Do tiddlywiki. (Things To Do)
You might wonder what the above has to do with email. Quite a lot really…
- I block out the first 30 minutes of the day to plan the day before I even look at email. I have to adapt my plans at times, but I’m less “reactive” to non-priority issues.
- These behaviors focus me on what I need to be doing so that I keep an eye on what is more important than email.
- I plan blocks of time to process email in batches. Schedule an hour, scan your emails, and respond to the most important ones first.
- I dedicate one day each week to real work. On this day, email is my lowest priority. I set a day-long appointment titled “Special Projects”, ignore the phone, and set my email to auto-respond with “I am not answering emails today as I am working on several projects that demand my full and uninterrupted attention.” I gave my boss and her assistant access to my calendar and explained what I was doing. While everyone else sees only that I am busy the whole day, my boss and her assistant can see it is “Special Projects” day and know I’m fine with them setting an appointment that day if it is necessary.
- I send less. Another Email Survival 101 tip is “send less to get less.” Along these lines, I started thinking about how to prevent email from killing other people. So…
- I check email on the weekends, but I don’t send it. I save replies as drafts, and send them Monday morning. If we all did this… you could check email on the weekends if you wanted, but miss nothing if you didn’t.
- This means I can be sure my reply is needed and up-to-date. I have written a few replies as I processed email, and late updated or just deleted them as unneeded.
- Instead of sending my manager five emails related to five tasks, I send one, and typing it all in one place reminds me to prioritize what I want.
Time and attention are finite resources
Part 1
My work week is pretty intense. It’s not that I am disorganized - anyone who knows me will tell you the exact opposite is true - rather, the workload itself has been impossible.
Last January I became the Interim Department Chair for a department of about 400 students, with one Associate Chair and a Department Manager on my team. Despite working 65 hours a week, it was impossible to do all of what I needed to do. I received on average over 100 emails a day, putting me on the IT Department’s list of the seven largest inboxes at The School, and sucking one full day of my week to just process them. Some days I had 6 to 7 hours of scheduled meetings while the email continued to pile up. Even if I forced one more work hour into my evening to hunch over my laptop, or spent the entire train ride home on my Blackberry, whatever dent I could make in my inbox was unnoticeable by 9:30 the next morning.
I’m not alone in this. John Hughes of University of Vermont figured that he worked 10 hours a day Monday through Friday for 48 weeks, and received 26,688 emails in a year. If he spent 4 minutes per email reading, responding, archiving, deleting… in effect, he worked from January 1st to May 10th and did nothing but process email.
Thus, while I read the advice of productivity gurus, I’m skeptical and just roll my eyes when folks say things like:
- “Every job is doable; you just have to know how to do it… work smarter, not harder“
- “If you analyze your job, outsource the trivial stuff, focus on what you alone can do - you will get down to a four hour work week“
- “The key is to process your Inbox to zero at the end of every day”
Things have changed though. Now we now have a permanent (and experienced) Department Chair, I’ve returned to being an Associate Chair, and we’ve hired a third Associate Chair as well. With five of us running the Department, it’s still intense but not impossible.
So… my New Year’s Resolution last January was simple. I resolved to stop email from killing me.
So this week and next, I’ll be posting on what I’ve done.
Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work - Gustave Flaubert
In the new wiki section, I posted my Things To Do tiddlywiki
- It allows individual tasks tagged by where you do it, how important it is, its status, and the project it is associated with.
- It includes a daily planner sheet to take with you showing your updated tasks and deadlines.
- I upgraded it to the 2.41 version of tiddlywiki and am using the upgraded one myself to bug test it.
The link is here Things To Do and I’m hoping anyone who uses it will leave some feedback if they like it, or bugs if they find them, or requests that would make it more useful if they have them…
Update: Wikipedia on GTD
So the Things To Do wiki I have posted is a tiddlywiki, and while I don’t know when I first saw one, I do know immediately liked the idea.
What is it?
- It’s a wiki (like wikipedia) which means it has small chunks of information linked and interlinked in various, flexible, ways to serve the needs of the user. Like old fashioned note cards, they are “entries” in wikipedia and “tiddlers” in tiddlywiki.
- I read the “wiki” part comes form a Hawaiian word for “quick.” Clicking a link takes you quickly to what you need to know. You can tag the tiddlers and quickly find related information as well.
- It’s tiddly, meaning small, as the whole thing is one file. That means it is portable - I carry mine on a flashdrive. You can access the file in opera, internet explorer, firefox… whatever you already have installed to access the internet, so it requires no special software.
What can you do with it?
- I adapted one tiddlywiki to use for my advisees and dissertation students. I have one tiddler for each student, information there about them, a picture, and links to their dissertation drafts and edits.
- This has some structure (one tiddler per student), uses very little tagging, and has minimal linking of information.
- I adapted another to serve as the front end for my library. Every stray thing I had filed in the cabinet was scanned by my Faculty assistant. It took a year but I have 1000+ articles and things scanned. The next year he entered abstracts for everything into the tiddlywiki, and linked these to the pdf. I can now search on any term and pull up an abstract for any article, book chapter, handout, paper, case example, podcast, … I have that’s related to it and access it immediately. While there are online services you can use for this, you can’t upload your files to them generally so this holds my files, and fits on a flash drive so I can keep a copy at home and at school.
- This has minimal structure (one tiddler per article), but very little linking as I couldn’t figure out a simple tagging system to classify it all. I just search on keywords and authors now.
- I adapted another to hold my course notes for a class on systems theory. Part of the theory is that systems are nonlinear, and what’s cause and what’s effect is largely a matter of perspective. I entered my notes, and started linking ideas as much as I could. My thought was to get all my notes in it, and then go over them again, hoping to see how I could better integrate systems terms and concepts. I didn’t have the time to quite finish it though.
- This has plenty of non-linear structure, uses a lot of tags which develop organically according to the information I enter, and includes heavy cross-linking of entries.
- I adapted another one for a task manager, which I’ve posted here. I enter tasks and tag them according to the larger project they are a part of, where I do them, their priority, and their status (active, pending, done). Some tiddlers are “someday/maybe” ideas that I record stray bits of information in, so they aren’t lost, but when the time comes to do something with them, all those stray bits of information are in one place. I can view tasks in a variety of ways depending on what I need, and can print this out daily to take with me to meetings.
- This has plenty of non-linear structure that organically changes as my job does, uses a lot of tagging, and allows for as much linking as I need to tie one task to related bits of information.
- Last, I adapted another one to track student issues (which I will post here eventually). This one was massive undertaking, as each student has a tiddler which houses other tiddlers of different types of information, tagged for that student. Each student is tagged according to key things we need to track (such as being on an Academic Development Plan, on a Leave of Absence, on Academic Watch…). Each student also has a set of tasks they must do by deadlines, which as tagged with the student name. I can see a student’s tasks and deadlines, or all deadlines and tasks overdue, due, and coming up.
- This is highly structured in a linear way, includes basic tagging which conforms to a set of fairly rigid rules, and includes lots of links to information for one student but no linking of information across students.
Why do I like it?
- It gives me a way to store information, and organize it the way I think.
- It means I truly have a “catch all” system to record all my thoughts, stray bits of information, and ideas, and not lose them.
Since the first posting, I’ve added
- I’ve re-uploaded another 30 or so articles after reformatting to the new style, and spell and grammar checking them with Word. Word’s not perfect, but is better than nothing. Most are added to the article index… just about 100 left…
- I incorporated a slick little bit of javascripting to autoindex articles so you can see what’s there and jump straight to the part that interests you.
- Book reviews or recommendations now include a separate icon for the Amazon link, and where included, an icon to link to the GoogleBooks copy of the book so you can read a bit of it if you like.
- I expanded the tags for articles … over 20 now to help you find what is relevant.
- Each article has a tagline… I’m trying to “brand” the site you know.
- The front page is slightly more attractive, and I’m looking for some (legal) photos and artwork to post.
- There’s a new section for wiki’s… which will be the subject of another entry or two.
Welcome!
So first entry requires some explaining I guess. I haven’t done much with PsychPage in over a year. Why… that’s the subject of a later entry but suffice it to say that work over the last 12 - 15 months has been rather demanding and has left no time for my website. So… I finally have gotten around to a redesign but more a revisioning of what it is.
What is it?
- First, it is leaner. I got the file logs for the last year to see what files are most referenced, and what files… are not. The whole site in the end should be half the size it was, especially with some page optimizing I should have done years ago.
- Next, it is simpler. The visual design is consistent across the whole site, and the whole thing feels much more integrated. The article index page is a wiki (TiddlyWiki to be exact) and so makes use of tagging now, which also makes it more easily integrated conceptually. I can also make updates much more consistently and thoroughly now. I can change the CSS in one place and change the whole site.
- Next, (I hope you find) it is visually more appealing. If you don’t know what it used to look like… good!
- Finally, I hope it’s more active. I’ve been thinking about what I can put here more often that is also more useful. It’s partly based on what I do now (GTD, Darkside, BooksRead, think on “Gen Me” people, and reflect a bit more on what I do now professionally).
So, look around and give me some feedback 
