My Love-Hate Relationship

I have a definite love-hate relationship with e-mail.

I really love that e-mail much simplifies my life. I actually think I would find my job extremely difficult without it because I contact so many people in such a short time and we exchange so much information that my ability to do what I do would be much inhibited without it.

I really hate that e-mail makes coming back to the office a painful painful experience. The Friday before the evaluation I cleared out my e-mail inbox. For me that means dealing with anything that needs to be done before I know I'll be in the office to deal with it again, and filing the rest of the e-mails into the e-mail folders I've made for each of my projects with color codes for how soon something needs to be done on that specific issue. I was then out of the office for the week of the evaluation, in addition to the first two days of the next week when I was in a social marketing training. I checked my e-mail halfway through the evaluation week to make sure there was nothing of dire emergency, and again on Sunday night for the same reason. There was very little that needed to be dealt with immediately and the enormity of the task ahead of me made it so that I didn't want to start what was not at emergency level. So last Wednesday I came into the office with approximately 400 e-mails to deal with. I'm not kidding - 400, at the least. And that is an understatement of how many I actually had because that was after I cleared out the 50 or so that were office week specific like when the supply room was open and that there was an e-mail problem which was then resolved.

Between last Wednesday and today I accomplished the slow and painful task of reigning my e-mail back under control. Day 1 - read, respond, and file any e-mails that were specific to the event I have tomorrow, which at that point was one week away. This literally took all day. Day 2 - read and delete all e-mails that were not specific to my program but that I needed to have a general understanding of the information for the purpose of doing my job (ex. some purchasing changes and a whole lot of listserve e-mails so I know what's going on with my audience). Day 3 - read, respond and file any e-mails that were specific to events I've got later this month or year. Day 4 - read, respond and file any e-mails that were specific to projects I'm working on outside of specific events, and respond to needs of other programs for information on mine or information on my audience. Day 5 (today) - read, respond and file any e-mails that involve me taking 20 minutes to write the response, 30 minutes to wait for my boss to OK the response, and then send the response or that necessitate a large amount of time on my or someone elses part getting information together and then sending it.

The ironic thing is that while I am doing this I'm still getting on average 50-80 e-mails a day that could fall into any one of those categories and for which I need to determine if I'm going to let hang out in the inbox or if I need to deal with it. And thus today, with much excitement I responded to and erased the last of the e-mails...just in time to be out of the office for two days at a training and a workshop.

At least I had 15 minutes of looking at a clear inbox!