Eiffel Over

Tag: email

  • Think of a world without any email

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

    So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

    There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

    Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

    Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

    *Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

  • Experiments in limiting modal shift

    I’m enjoying listening to ‘World without Email‘ by Cal Newport. I’ve been an aficionado of inbox-management techniques for many years, but this book adds in new layers of systems and computer science understanding that I have found fascinating.

    The book is a critique of the ‘hyper-active hive mind’, the term he uses to describe the way many knowledge workers now interact with each other. I don’t plan to summarise his key points here; rather to chart an experiment I am running.

    I am interested in the idea of minimising modal shift, in other words, how often my brain flips from one activity to another. It is amazing how hard it is to stay focused on just one task, even if it is enjoyable. There are so many factors driving me towards the pull of distraction: the dopamine hit of a new message; the fear of social ostracisation if I don’t respond to a message; the design of the software itself leads me to distraction.

    As Newport describes, we slip into just firing off messages because it is so easy, but by doing so we use up the attention capital of everyone else. It is a case of the tragedy of the commons. Instead, he says, we need to do the hard work of inventing systems for how we should communicate more effectively for different tasks.

    Today I have enjoyed spending some time with Regenerative Design Lab co-convenor Ellie Osborne designing a process for short-listing, interviewing and finalising candidates for the next cohort of lab participants that requires the bare minimum use of our email inboxes. Features of the design are:

    • Agreeing where shared information can be stored – not in an email mailbox.
    • Finding tools to that enable candidates to book interview slots without the need for email back-and-forth.
    • Identifying in advance what things we might need to communicate about and booking in that conversation ahead of time, so that we can save queries for that exchange.

    Setting this system up hopefully means both of us can get on with arranging the interviews with minimal recourse to our email inboxes. And that should mean we can spend more time focusing on the design of the lab itself.

    I’ll report back on how the experiment went.

  • Too many emails – the Eiffel Over guide

    Too many emails – the Eiffel Over guide

    I am a connoisseur of email-reduction strategies, so I share this for friends and colleagues of mine who I know are struggling with this at the moment. The best way of dealing with having too many emails is never ‘answer all the emails’. Email overload is a systems problem. It manifests itself as an overflowing inbox but it is rooted in the way the system is set up. Answer all the emails and new ones will appear. We have to fix the system.

    I will start by saying that I still have too many emails. But I don’t feel bad about it because I am trying to work on the system. And some of my system changes have been helpful and I can see are working. This post is not supposed to be a definitive guide but a few things to get you started.

    (more…)

  • The email that knocks out creative surplus

    You are in a state of flow. The next action flows from the previous. You are in the moment. Then boom, in comes an email that sets off a chain reaction of anxiety and worry. At least that’s what just happened to me. Your creative surplus – time and attention – gets burned on managing your personal response to that email. You are back to zero. What do you do next?

    (more…)

  • Think, feel, do – shorter emails

    I picked up this tip at home yesterday – thanks Mary. It’s a formula for getting to the point when writing emails. What do you want the person to think, what do you want them to feel and what do you want them to do. That’s it. You can save background context for another time for further down the email if you wish.

    As an added challenge, see if you can get it down to three sentences.

  • Apollo 8 | What do you do with your computer?

    Apollo 8 | What do you do with your computer?

    I’ve been listening the BBC World Service’s podcast ’13 Minutes to the Moon’ about the Apollo space programme. Last night I listened to the episode about Apollo 8, the perhaps forgotten daring mission that enabled the moon landings to happen. I woke up this morning thinking just what an incredible achievement it was.

    (more…)
  • Use these 5 apps to create distraction-free time.

    Use these 5 apps to create distraction-free time.

    We need distraction-free time to make progress on our creative projects. At the same time, we rely on online networks and information to nourish our ideas. The trouble is, spending time online is rarely distraction-free. So, is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

    The short answer is yes. In this post I share the strategies that I have adopted to maintain distraction-free time while working online. These include five apps that I regularly use to manage what information I see and when.

    This post follows on from my previous post 9 ways to build creativity in your organisation, focusing on steps that individuals can take to manage their own creativity. Expect more from me on this theme in coming posts.

    Principles

    There are four principles that underpin my approach:

    1 – Know your mode

    In his book ‘Getting Things Done‘, David Allen tells readers not confuse time when you are processing actions with time when you are completing an action. The same is true for working online. Be clear about whether you are meant to be processing emails/tweets etc, completing an action or, importantly,  spending time reading.

    2- Avoid the inbox

    Enter the inbox, get all the information you need out of there, and then leave. If you return when you are in the middle of something else, don’t be surprised if you get distracted.

    3- Reduce the back-and-forth

    Just because we can respond instantly, doesn’t mean we have to. Instant responses lead to communication inflation, and erode time to ourselves.

    4- Remove notifications

    Until the last 100 or so years, toothache must have been the bain of adults lives – always nagging, never leaving us in peace. Today, in the age of modern dentistry, what nags us instead, what disrupts our peace, are social media notifications. If we set regular times to look at our various feeds, we don’t need notifications.

    5 apps

    I am being generous with the definition of ‘apps’, here to mean both ‘app-lications’ and ‘app-roaches’.

    1 – Task management – use Bullet Journal

    The first app isn’t an app at all, it’s an instead-of-an-app. For years I’ve been playing around with lots of different apps for managing tasks. My favourites are OnmiFocus and Trello. The trouble with even the best of these tools is that they allow you to create never-ending lists of tasks that you could never get done.

    Bullet Journal is different. It is no more than a set of rules for using a paper notebook to manage your tasks. It’s simple, and it works. Each day you write down the tasks you need to complete. At the end of the day, you either forward incomplete tasks to the next day, by physically writing them out again, or your forward it to a page for the week or even month ahead, again physically writing down the tasks. It works because every time you re-write something you end up saying to yourself, ‘come on, am I actually going to do this?’

    I’ve been using it for four months now and I’m hooked. Here’s a great intro video for using Bullet Journal.

    2 – Information storage and online workspace – Evernote

    Evernote is a great tool for storing information and for working online. Here’s how I use it to minimise distractions.

    1. As I am processing emails, if I find something that I need to refer to later for a particular project, I forward it to Evernote (which you can do straight from your email), adding meta tags in the subject line so that Evernote can file it for me.
    2. When I am working on a project, I can then look through the notes filed in Evernote that have that project tagged. It’s a great way to get to the information without being distracted by something new in the inbox.
    3. I do all first drafts of longer emails in Evernote – I can even send them from Evernote without having to go back into my inbox.

    One really neat feature of Evernote is that as you use it more and more, it starts to recognise when something you are writing is similar to a previous note – this has the added bonus of making connections that I hadn’t otherwise seen.

    3 – Online reader – Instapaper

    Until I discovered Instapaper, I had basically stopped reading the articles that people were sending me online. This happened as a consequence of being rigourous about not spending more than two minutes processing any email that someone had sent me. If a correspondent had sent me something to read, I would forward it to a folder called ‘browsing’ where it would then languish unread.

    And then I discovered Instapaper, an app that you can forward reading informaiton to. When you open the app, all your articles are there but with the formatting stripped away. What’s left is really clear to read.

    Since then I usually make at least one time a week when I sit down with a cup of coffee and read my articles for the week on Instapaper. It is really refreshing to spend time reading longer articles from end to end.

    If I like what I read, I forward it to Evernote, tagged for appropriate interests. If I want to share it with other people, I forward it to Buffer – see below.

    4 – Schedule social media posts using Buffer

    I know from looking at the analytics that most of the people that follow me are online at times when I’d rather not be. To get round this I use Buffer to schedule some of my social media posts to maximise the chances that the people I want to see the post do. Buffer allows you to set up daily posting schedules for all your social media channels. You can save time by posting to several channels simulataneously. Buffer will tell you what times your audience members are interacting with your contact, and can adjust your posting schedule to suit.

    5 – Clear yesterday’s messages today

    This is a great rule of thumb that I only came across recently in the Guardian (thanks Jenny for the recommendation!). I’ve long abandoned the idea of having an empty inbox – as a strategy it takes too much time and I think can actually lead to more email traffic. In this approach, on any given day, you should only aim to deal with yesterday’s emails. You are still responding within 24 hours, which is a reasonable timeframe, but your response has to be carefully written as you have to empower your correspondent to act without hearing from you againfor 24 hours.

    Conclusion

    My Dad once quoted the following to me (I am hoping he can remember where it came from and can tell us in the comments to this post): getting information from the internet is a bit like trying to take a sip of water from a fire extinguisher.

    Yes, we need access to online information and networks for our creative projects – we just need to manage the flow.

    Related posts

    Image credit: Fire Extinguishers by Claudio González is available under CC-BY-2.0