James Wiseman

I saw this homepage recently, where the website ownser offers anyone else with the name “Ashley Hurst” an email address @JamesWiseman.com and it occurred to me that it might be nice to offer an equivalent service here on JamesWiseman.com.

So, if your name is James Wiseman, and you are looking for an email address @JamesWiseman.com then drop me a line.

I currently have dibs on the following:

• mail
• james
• adsense
• webmaster

But you are welcome to anything else (within reason – nothing sweary or offensive)

I’m not planning to charge anything, but if it becaomes hassle to administer, then I may ask for a small one-off fee, or something.

We can work the details out

I took four days leave this week (Monday-Thursday) to spend more time with my family. The only reason that I didn’t take the Friday off is that I’m short on leave. But that’s not important right now.

I had about 150 items of email in my inbox awaiting me when I returned, which I’m sure is modest compared with some out there.

My strategy for dealing with this was as follows:

1. Identify the junk and delete appropriately.
2. Start reading from the at the earliest mail
3. Mark any email required for follow-up as ‘unread’ and leave all the others as read.
4. Do not reply to anything until you have read everything, and then respond where required.
5. Respond by phone or face-to-face where possible. The time you spend walking to the other end of the office is generally less than the time it takes to word a succinct reply.

I’ve been caught out before where I’ve started responding to an email early in a thread, only to look foolish when some resolution/conclusion presented itself later on. I’ve also spent considerable time in the past crafting carefully worded and verbose emails to justify my arguments where a face-to-face meeting or a phone call would have saved a lot of time.

It took me a bit of time (I’ll not say how much) to get through everything, and get things resolved to my satisfaction. This got me into thinking – How much time must we spend on email each week/month/year.

A colleague of mine once estimated that they spent almost a quarter of time dealing with emails. Staggering! The observations of the Mythical Man Month with regard to channels of communication are still alive and kicking! Another once commented that they ignored all emails they were only CC’d into on the basis that it can’t be that important if they weren’t the primary recipient.

Personally, I’m not a fan of meetings and the design-by-committee side-effect they seem to engender, but sometimes they are better than a whole load of people tapping away their opinions on a keyboard.

So next time you find yourself looking at an inbox full of mail, it might be worth considering how much time you are actually spending, what of it is value, and how you can streamline your processes for dealing with it.