I had no idea what a chore it would be to keep up with school e-mail. Every time i walk away from my desk i come back to five or more new messages. Most of the e-mails fall into one of three categories. The first category is event announcements. There are a lot of lectures that take place each week and i'm sent an e-mail for each one. The second category is ticket brokering. Fellow students feel the need to flood the group e-mail lists with offers to sell or exchange their football tickets for a particular game. And the last category are messages i actually need for the research project i'm helping out with. These are the only messages that are actually useful to me.
The should be a rule about forwarding messages to distribution lists that you are not a member of. On separate occasions i've seen the exact same e-mail forwarded to one of the school e-mail lists multiple times by different people. Clearly the subsequent senders did not know that the information had already been passed along. Again, it's not a new message, it's just forwarded from somewhere else. I suppose i shouldn't complain too much about these messages as they are really easy to delete and be done with.
I like the whole Inbox Zero philosophy but i'm not quite there yet. Right now i've made a pledge to myself not to allow my inbox to scroll which limits me to roughly 30 e-mails max in my inbox at a time. Once i start nearing the limit i review what's still there and make adjustments. I'm sure i'll have the opportunity to improve my message triage skills over the course of the semester.
Posted by Matthew at September 13, 2007 10:27 PM