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.