Two Tools for Speed and Fun with Email

As announced in my last post of last year, in 2018 I will continue to post on Mondays, with the first and third Mondays of the month devoted to posts related to my own work and/or work-in-progress. 

How I wish I could be posting about a new podcast or excerpt from my book-in-progress, but this finds me still mired in the mudslide of tasks post-household move #2.

The first move was late last summer, and a second one last fall, the furniture and Texas Bibliothek arriving on the other side of the ocean only last month... (It was actually substantially more than two moves but I won't bore you with the details.)

One of the tasks in the mudslide is catching up on email.

Those of you who have been following this blog well know that email management is a subject I have been tangling with, and fascinated by, for an age-- well, since 1996, when I first got an email account, as a matter of fact. Back in 2016-- before the moves-- I had made such substantial progress with my email process that I posted this blog's all-time most popular post:

EMAIL NINJERIE IN THE THEATER OF SPACE-TIME

OR,

THIS WRITER'S 10- POINT PROTOCOL FOR INBOX 1O (ISH)

I still stand by my 10-point protocol; however, I now consider that post as less a celebration than a handy reminder to myself to take my own advice as life's Black Swan-esque episodes may demand. 

Over the past months, further refinements with my email process, such as using a Zassenhaus timer helped, as did insights from further noodling... But moving house being the utter chaos that moving  house is, the email backlog accumulated up to, understandably, one heckuva Himalaya.

Now it's already more a Sierra Madre; daunting, yes, but with relatively more sky. But of course I'm aiming for a wide sky over low rolling hills... And it's getting rather tiresome to be starting almost every single email with an apology for the delay.

Over the past few weeks two new things have helped me make faster progress and at the same time have some fun. Herewith:


#1. I now use the Mr. Stopwatch app for batching email. 

This not just another stopwatch app; I can click on the option to have each elapsed minute loudly announced by, I presume, the app designer, which is so perfectly annoyingly perfect.

What do I mean, perfectly annoyingly perfect? One of the problems I've had is, ironically, spending too much time on email and so ending up dithering around in a Ludic loop. I find I can work down more of my email backlog when I process it in batches of say, 20 minutes-- and the trick is to actually stop after 20 minutes. With the audio on-the-minute option, Mr. Stopwatch is so annoying -- which is perfect for me!-- that I usually yearn to stop after 10 - 15 minutes, which is even better.

For email, Mr. Stopwatch beats the Zassenhaus. Anyway, I forgot to pack my Zassenhaus.

Screenshot from my new favorite app, Mr. Stopwatch

My writing assistant with a small selection of postcards
soon to be mailed.

#2. Whenever apt, and if I feel so moved, I send a postcard instead.

Inspired by Karen Benke's Write Back Soon! I have begun keeping a batch of postcards handy near my laptop.

I myself am charmed to receive postcards (I mean personal, not junk mail, of course), so I would assume that some of my correspondents might feel the same way-- and so, with a postcard I can say hello to friends and family without adding another email to their personal Himalayas or Alps, or speedbumpitos, or what have you.

P.S. Nope, no Whatsapp, no FB, and I have largely abandoned Twitter. And I just might start typing my postcard messages on a typewriter! But I have to get another typewriter. For reasons too ridiculous to elaborate on here, I had to leave my beautiful 1961 Hermes 3000 on the other side of the ocean.

All this said, I sincerely do appreciate email.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Q & A with Karen Benke, 

Poet, Creativity and Fun Maven, Letter Writing Aficionada, 

and Author of Write Back Soon! Adventures in Letter Writing

"Dear Mother, am feeling fine, hard s a rock and brown as an Indian... "

More Postcards from the US-Mexico Border Circa 1916

Book Review

Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You

Email Ninjerie Update: Old-School Tool to Break the Ludic Loop

Behold the Zassenhaus.

Back in December of 2016 I posted "Email Ninjerie in the Theater of Space-Time or, This Writer's 10 Point Protocol for Inbox 10 (ish)." As I explained, for me the game-changer was point #1, tackling email in scheduled batches using a stopwatch. To quote:

I usually do 20 minutes of email processing with a stopwatch. It's not that I am trying to hurry through my email, but rather, I am respecting the limits of my brain's ability to effectively focus on it. I'm a speed-reader and I can type faster than lickety-split, but on most days I can deal with email for only about 20 minutes before my brain cells run low on glucose and I end up scrolling up and down the screen, dithering, feeling scattered— in short, procrastinating. (You might be able to do 10 minutes, or, say, an hour in one go— of course, not everyone's energy to focus on their email is the same, or the same every day and in every circumstance. One can always set the stopwatch for a different amount of time.) 

Don't believe me about batching? Check out the extra-crunchy research at MIT (PDF). 

By processing email in 20 minute batches, when the sessions all add up over the arc of the day, I find that I accomplish more in, say, one hour of three separate 20 minute sessions than I would have had I plowed on for an hour straight.

When the stopwatch dings, I do not expect to have finished— "inbox zero" is a fata morgana! And that's OK, because I have another email batch session already scheduled (a few hours later, or five minutes later. It's important to take a break, at the very least stand up and stretch.)

Above all, because I am focussing on email at my convenience, on my schedule, my attention is no longer so fractured... [Read the complete post here] 

I didn't put it this way in that post, but now that I've grokked the term ludic loop, I must say, that rrrrrring slices right through it. In other words, paradoxically, the reason I was drowning in email was that I was spending too much time on it. That is, I would get stuck in a ludic loop, checking, looking, checking, looking. 

Yes, indeed, gentle reader, batching with a stopwatch works. But of course, when it goes off, you have to actually stop. I added the habit of standing up. Bell rings, I stand up. 

Which stopwatch to use? Of course everybody and their uncle's cousin's zonkey has a smartphone with a stopwatch app, and I know, for a lot of people, especially those under the age of 30, any other option would be, like LOL, a total eye-roller. 

For those answering email on their laptop, such as myself, I recommended using a free on-line stopwatch (get yours here). 

But of late, I have switched to using a mechanical Zassenhaus kitchen timer.* I chose that particular brand because it's better quality and heavier than the average cheap-o plastic kitchen timer.

Why an old-fashioned kitchen timer, pray tell? Because using something not on the computer screen but in the real world-- ye olde meatspace-- helps me stay focused on the task at-hand. It's one less reason look at the "desktop," one less thing to have to go click on (and so reduce the risk of another journey down the rabbit hole, or to put it another way, of getting caught in a ludic loop). 

As I quoted David Allen in my guest-blog for "Cool Tools" on why I use a paper-based organizing system, "low-tech is oftentimes better because it is in your face."

Methinks Dmitry Orlov is onto something. But that's another post.


*Perhaps you are wondering if I have not heard of Francesco Cerillo's The Pomodoro Technique and  his tomato-shaped kitchen timer? (Pomodoro means tomato in Italian.) Actually, I have... long, long ago... so long ago that I had entirely forgotten about it until this very moment! Well, definitely, Cerillo is onto something! Check out his website and watch his introductory video about the technique here. But I am not actually using the  "pomodoro" technique which, as I understand from having just watched the above-linked video, is about doing all kinds of work in stopwatched 25 minute "pomodoros," or chunks of time. For the past months I have been working on email in not only 20 minute batches but also 10 minute and, on occasion, even 5 minute batches. Neither do I want to stopwatch all the work I do... I like a lot of fluidity in my day.

One of the benefits of fluidity in one's day:
As the Muse does not call,
one can ever and always take the opportunity to 
assume energizing random yoga poses.
My writing assistant demonstrates.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

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