Lately I’ve been thinking I need a secretary. Having somebody create digests of my e-mail, book planes/hotels/cars, call the oil burner repairman, drop off film at the lab, etc. — something like the remote assistant I wrote about a while ago. (In fact, paying other people to do all sorts of things for us in India — do the laundry, carry the bags, drive the car, and on and one — was eventually wonderfully convenient but initially extemely discomforting to someone raised by Calvinists.)

Alas, we live in a self-service world. So I’m just going to have to do all of that stuff myself. Fortunately, Merlin Mann has created 43Folders, a blog that (a) feeds the American/Calvinist belief in perfect (or at least “perfectable”) productivity and (b) promises to help me meet all those various demands on my time.

Keeping up with the ideas and actions contained in e-mail is my Achilles heel. Are we all overconnected and overcommitted? Or do we only feel that way because we have a fractured, “always on” mindset made worse by poor e-mail habits? To borrow Mann’s rephrasing of productivity guru David Allen, is our “cognitive dissonance epic?” Maybe . . . Probably . . .

At any rate, I’m trying a number of little experiments to feel better about having more demands on me at work (which really is a good thing). Let’s start with e-mail. First, empty my inbox (get to the zero message, as our friends at Toyota might say). Then, clean up the rather small backlog of mostly unimportant messages. Finally, update my processes to become an “e-mail ninja.”

The idea is simple:

  • spend time on tasks where it can do the most good (and that isn’t checking e-mail);
  • convert e-mails into actions or reference materials quickly;
  • get the processed mail out of sight and mind by deleting or filing it;
  • check e-mail no more than once every 1-2 hours;
  • use rules to automatically move “noncritical” messages to the appropriate place;
  • set aside small chunks of time (5-20 minutes) to delete, archive, and answer as much important mail as possible;
  • schedule time to read and/or clean up noncritical messages (from mailing lists, blogs, and other sources) at most 2-3 times per week;
  • write small, pithy e-mails that are easy for others to read and process.