E-mail triage tracking report:
8/7/19 — started at 1625 e-mails — down to 1373 after 90 minutes working side-by-side with Stephanie.
Massive progress, very heartening, but of course, we’re mostly going for low-hanging fruit at first — tons of totally random political, fundraising, etc. messages that I somehow just got too harried and didn’t delete the first time through. So it’s very fast now, and I’m expecting it to slow down.
I also have checked for and cleared all the academic e-mails, and scheduled the GLAS meetings into my calendar, etc., which is a great weight off my mind. No snakes lurking on that front. Onwards.
I have gotten totally avoidant about e-mail over the last few years, but this is really helping — having an accountability buddy, essentially, who meets me at a specified time, and then we sit down to do e-mail. Like going to the gym with a friend. Of course, this is a paid buddy, so it’s a little more like a personal trainer at the gym, but same basic principle.
Getting my digital life in order — once we finish the e-mail (FINISH THE E-MAIL! WHAT A LOVELY THOUGHT!), I hope to move on to her helping me organize my physical office. And then Stephanie and Heather can take over organizing my Trello board and task lists? And so on.
We’re hoping Stephanie will also be able to be my main e-mail point of contact for business-related messages, with close friends and family writing to a separate account, to reach me directly.
Also with academic e-mails, library trustee e-mails, and SLF e-mails also going to separate accounts, or at least being directed into separate folders that I work on at specific times? We’ll see how that goes!
Clearly the current system of it all coming in as a big jumble and I glance at it and then don’t deal with it because it’s all too much and too overwhelming was not working. Almost anything would be an improvement, I think. 🙂
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