An attempt to handle mails better
#################################

:date: 01/03/2013
:status: draft

Those of you who wrote me emails know it, I'm really bad at handling them. This
is because I don't have any flow in place. Recently, I surprised myself
not even reading all these emails. And this means frustration for me and for
the people who expect me to read them.

So here is an attempt to solve this.

When I first gave some thoughts to this, I directly thought about "how to
automatically improve my inbox", or "how to let the machine do the work rather
than myself.

When reading emails, you then need to take actions. Some can be automated
/ short, some cannot.

Tooling
=======

I currently have a folder for each "project" I'm involved in. This means
a lot of projects, and a lot of folders. For instance, when I get a mail from
`marketplace-devs@mozilla.org`, it goes to the `marketplace` folder.

Let's try to list from where I receive emails and what I should do with
them.

- low-involvement mailling-lists
- high-involvement mailing-lists
- work-related bugmails
- non-work-related bugmails
- personal mails
- work-related mails

Low-involvement mailing-lists
-----------------------------

These are probably the easiest to get rid of. I subscribed to a bunch of
technical discussion groups, for instance django-dev, pyramid-dev, catalog-sig,
distutils-sig, python-dev and others.

Since you can find most of these public mailing-lists online, my last move was
to just unsubscribe from them, telling myself I'll read them there.

Obviously, this isn't true because I never read them online until someone
points me to an interesting discussion there, but it seems that the really
interesting topics pops up on twitter / IRC from time to time, and the spare
time it creates is really worth some good information less.

High-involvement mailing-list
-----------------------------

In this category, I put the mailing lists you have to read, think once, think
again and answer. Answering to emails isn't always something I do
straight-away. Sometimes I'm not good-enough technically to answer really
quickly, and it needs some research from me. Sometimes it just needs some time
for my brain to pick everything up before answering.

I currently keep these emails "unread" in their folder, and try to get back to
it later. Which I usually don't do. And everything ends up in limbo.

I actually created a second mailbox for myself where I send all the tasks
I need to take time to do. That's a TODO list, but I can actually send it
emails.

Every day, I try to find some time to take one of these tasks and have an
answer for these mails.  So far it's working well, but I'm wondering what will
happen if I get too much mails in there.

Bug mails (work or non-work related)
------------------------------------

I read them on the fly and see if I have something to do with them. Most of the
time I don't and so I delete them. When I do, I assign myself a task in GTG to
deal with later.

I work for Mozilla only 4 days per week. The goal is to have some time during
the extra day to take care of the others projects I'm involved with.

Usually I manage to do what I need to do during this 5th day. If I do and
things stack up, the first thing I do is to make the people that are / would be
waiting on me aware of the situation. This usually solves the problem.

Directed mails
--------------

Once I've setup the rules I described, the remaining mails I receive are
directed personal mails. Hopefully, for me that means not too much mails, and
I'm able to answer them in an acceptable time-frame. I usually try to answer
them straight ahead if I can, also, or convert the ones that ask me for
something special into a GTG task.

Discipline
==========

That would be foolish to think everything only takes tools. It also takes some
discipline. 

I'm trying something: I'm spending a little 30mn to an hour reading mails in
the morning, eventually answering if the answer is short; plus another hour in
the afternoon to answer to the longer mails that would had need some more
thinking for me.

Pelican
=======

I receive a lot of mails about pelican, and to be honnest I don't read most of
them by now because I know it means I'll have to read text, code, and
eventually make comments on these.

And whenever I read these mails, I usually don't have time to handle them right
away. Most of these mails come from github pull requests. This means I got
a mail each time someone open, comment or close on a bug or issue.

Okay, so what do I do with that? Currently, these mails end-up in a "folder" on
my email, so they don't languish on my inbox, which is a first good step, but
I would need 

Mozilla
=======

At mozilla, most of the interesting emails are discussions, but I currently
don't separate the bugmails from the other emails, so in the same box, without
a lot of distinction I receive all the discussions for the different lists I'm
on, and for the code review / issues that are done on either bugzilla or
github.
