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<h1 class="post-title">An attempt to handle mails better</h1>
<span class="post-date">03 janvier 2013</span>
<img id="illustration" src="" />
<div class="post article">
<h1>🌟</h1>
<p>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.</p>
<p>So here is an attempt to solve this.</p>
<p>When I first gave some thoughts to this, I directly thought about &quot;how to
automatically improve my inbox&quot;, or &quot;how to let the machine do the work rather
than myself.</p>
<p>When reading emails, you then need to take actions. Some can be automated
/ short, some cannot.</p>
<div class="section" id="tooling">
<h2>Tooling</h2>
<p>I currently have a folder for each &quot;project&quot; I'm involved in. This means
a lot of projects, and a lot of folders. For instance, when I get a mail from
<cite>marketplace-devs&#64;mozilla.org</cite>, it goes to the <cite>marketplace</cite> folder.</p>
<p>Let's try to list from where I receive emails and what I should do with
them.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>low-involvement mailling-lists</li>
<li>high-involvement mailing-lists</li>
<li>work-related bugmails</li>
<li>non-work-related bugmails</li>
<li>personal mails</li>
<li>work-related mails</li>
</ul>
<div class="section" id="low-involvement-mailing-lists">
<h3>Low-involvement mailing-lists</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="high-involvement-mailing-list">
<h3>High-involvement mailing-list</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I currently keep these emails &quot;unread&quot; in their folder, and try to get back to
it later. Which I usually don't do. And everything ends up in limbo.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="bug-mails-work-or-non-work-related">
<h3>Bug mails (work or non-work related)</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="directed-mails">
<h3>Directed mails</h3>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="discipline">
<h2>Discipline</h2>
<p>That would be foolish to think everything only takes tools. It also takes some
discipline.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="pelican">
<h2>Pelican</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Okay, so what do I do with that? Currently, these mails end-up in a &quot;folder&quot; on
my email, so they don't languish on my inbox, which is a first good step, but
I would need</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="mozilla">
<h2>Mozilla</h2>
<p>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.</p>
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