Taming the E-mail Beast

Here’s what I do. What do you do?

April 2008 By Denny Hatch

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“Feed the e-mail beast. We all do it, from the time we log on in the morning till late in the day when a last thought needs to be shared with a colleague or friend,” wrote Paul McDougall and Elena Malykhina on InformationWeek.com in 2006. “We’re sending messaging morsels over mobile devices to try to satiate its insatiable appetite. Don’t feed the beast—take off a week, a day, even an hour—and you fall dangerously behind.”

Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, once had 2,500 unread e-mails in her inbox and declared “e-mail bankruptcy.” She told everyone on her e-mail list that she had not responded and to contact her again if it were important. And then she deleted it all. It was she who reportedly coined the phrase “e-mail bankruptcy” back in 1999.

“It’s a metaphor for basically reassessing where your e-mail habit has taken you,” Turkle told CTV in Canada, “and what you need to do to get it under control.”

Readers of this cranky little e-zine know that if they send in a comment—whether for publication or privately—they will always get a personal reply from me unless they send the wrong return address.

When I told my wife, Peggy, how I deal with e-mail, she told me I was doing it all wrong.

If you have a better system, I (and your fellow readers) would sure like to hear it.

A Liberating Experience
I loved having a one-line address: dennyhatch@aol.com. Just 17 characters and a dot was all that was needed to reach me 24/7 through any Internet portal in the world.

Then I heard a recording of Vincent Ferrari, who tried to cancel his AOL account and the AOL rep refused. The conversation got ugly and turned into a PR catastrophe for AOL, one from which the company never really recovered. (If you’ve forgotten this exercise in marketing sleaze, see the hyperlink below.) I opened a Yahoo! account, and an amazing thing happened: My inbox was suddenly manageable. Instead of hundreds of e-mails a day, I was getting 20 to 30.

Since then, the count has picked up. But it is nothing to the crap flooding my AOL account.

I still keep the AOL account, now that it, too, is free. This is a backup in case Yahoo! goes bust. And even though the account has not been active for nearly two years, I still get roughly 200 e-mails a day, which I scan and delete in about 30 seconds.

Takeaway point number one to consider: If your e-mail is getting out of hand, switch to another provider and send news of the change to your nearest and dearest colleagues, friends and family only.

So how do I deal with e-mail?

1. The First Cut
I absolutely do not want to see the same e-mail sitting in my box more than once.

When I open my Yahoo inbox, I immediately click on the universal check box at the top. All e-mails are checked.

Using the cursor, I scan down the list. On those messages where I do not recognize the sender or have no interest in the subject, the check mark remains.

On those messages that are worth a second look, I delete the check mark.

I hit the delete button. Of the first 25 messages, perhaps 10 remain and 15 more appear. I repeat the process, deleting the checks on the first 10 and quickly deciding which others to keep and which to delete. I repeat again until the inbox contains only messages that may be worth reading.

If I receive 100 messages on my Yahoo! account, perhaps 25 to 30 remain.

2. Prioritize
Two kinds of messages remain:

* Those that require a quick answer—dinner invitations, personal gossip, meeting confirmations—anything that can be disposed of with a quick answer. I deal with these, record decisions on my e-calendar where applicable, and delete the original e-mails.

* E-mails of substance, where a detailed response and special handling are needed. These break down into three groups, of which the largest group, and the one I’ll talk about here today, are comments from readers of Business Common Sense.

These arrive via Yahoo! This is my signal to access a “Comment Admin” system attached to this e-zine. I go there and copy and paste each raw response—along with the name of the sender and the sender’s e-mail—into a Word document titled CORR-04-29-08 (or whatever the date may be).

After pasting the comment into the Word document, it is lightly edited. Curious little symbols for paragraphs breaks are deleted, typos fixed, spell-checked, etc. Substance and wording are never changed. Once the copy is clean, I paste the edited letter back into the system and click the “Approve” box. It automatically appears in the Comment section at the end of the newsletter.

This procedure is followed for each subsequent letter. The edited comments are ganged up on the day’s Word document and will be gang-answered later. It is imperative to get the reader comments into the newsletter ASAP, so that other readers can see who’s saying what. The correspondence enhances the experience and information, as readers agree, disagree and frequently add a dimension to the story that I may have missed.

The Day’s Word Document With All the Edited E-mail Comments
Now I have a Word document with anywhere from two to 20 or more comments as they appear in the newsletter—each separated by:

AAAAAAAAAAA

This is my private sign that separates things and is easy to do—pinky on “Shift” and fourth finger on A.

At some point—right away, or later in the day—I write personal answers over each e-mail and separate my answer from the original message with:

- - - - - - - - - - -

Each reply and original comment is pasted into to an outgoing e-mail message box. I paste the subscriber’s e-mail in the address box. In the subject box I type “F,” whereupon “From Denny Hatch” comes up, and I send the thing.

The subscriber sees my personal reply. Underneath it is his or her message as it appears in the e-zine.

As each response is sent, I change that completed correspondence (original comment and my answer) to blue type, so it is immediately obvious which have been answered and which have not.

If I get a response to my response, it is pasted onto the Word document above my response and my new response (if any) is typed above that, turned blue and sent.

At the end of the day, I have all the day’s exchanges in blue type on a Word document, which is then transferred to a flash drive for temporary backup and, once a week, transferred to the master CORR files on my external drive and laptop. The external backup drive lives in a safe. This means all reader exchanges are archived in three separate places—this desktop computer, the laptop and the external hard drive.

All original reader e-mails are deleted.

If I need to retrieve an exchange, the Apple OS 10.4 finder is incredible. I type in a name, a keyword, an e-mail address and it pops up in a nanosecond.

Personal Comments From Readers
Sometimes a reader wants to contact me privately—outside the e-zine system—and write directly to my Yahoo! address. These communications and my replies are treated the same as those that come into the Comment Admin system. Each is personally answered, but does not appear in the newsletter. (If it is a lively comment, I urge the writer to go back to businesscommonsense.com and paste it in the system so it can be shared with other readers.) Sometimes my answers are short and snappy; some readers find a full-length article in the body of the e-mail relating to what they wrote.

Why Convert E-mails to Word Documents?

A rule of thumb in nonfiction is: Put everything about the same subject in the same place.

Example: I am a fan of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her book, “No Ordinary Time” about the White House during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, is a stunner. So I bought her “Team of Rivals” about Abraham Lincoln and his relationships with William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase and Edward Bates. The book was a disaster. She kept devoting different chapters to different guys, confusing the hell out of me as to who was who and why. As the author, she had everybody straight in her head, but she lost me. Further, the only really interesting guy was Lincoln. I found the rest of the guys—and their families—boring as dirt. I tried reading only the Lincoln chapters until I threw in the towel and gave the book to my brother-in-law. The similar things were in too dissimilar places to follow.

E-mails are raw documents. Prior to the age of computers and Internet communications, we received paper memos and supporting documents. These individual pieces of paper would be noted and then consigned to a Pendaflex folder devoted to the subject and filed, perhaps by date received.

In the old days, if you wanted to revisit a set of correspondence, you would physically remove the memos and various attachments from the file and rifle through them one by one. Files were fat with papers, and it was exasperating when something was misfiled or lost.

With a word processing system, the entire collection of memos (e-mails) can be pasted onto a single document in whatever order is most appropriate. Instead of extracting a bunch of papers from a file, a simple mouse click opens the entire series of exchanges, and I can scan down or up to refresh memory. I can create replies right on the master document, paste it into an e-mail and send it off. A blue e-mail is something that has been sent. Black type can be notes or unanswered e-mail. One of these documents will be titled, for example, “ABC Xchang.”

If additional material is part of the story—legal documents, photos, etc.—a file can be opened and these items included.

To me, this is a huge time- and space-saver.

Saving Actual E-mails
Four weeks ago a guy phoned me wanting to use my services for a charity he was starting. I sent him several proposals and his people e-mailed me back. He was looking to raise a lot of money—millions—from celebrities and big corporations, but he did not have a business plan. I began to smell a rat and withdrew from the project. I never billed him or anything; it was amicable.

However, I retrieved and saved all the actual e-mail exchanges in a Yahoo! file. If the guy runs into trouble with the law—and my name comes up—I want to make sure my backside is covered.

I am also collecting a file of e-mails from the Hillary Clinton campaign (more than 200 of them so far)—and many fewer from Barack Obama—in case I want to do a story on political e-mail.

But generally speaking, if I can have as much related stuff as possible in one document, I find everything to be more coherent, and it saves me time.

Templates
Sometimes I receive repeated requests that require the same answer. I maintain a small file of letters that I can access, paste into an e-mail and fire off. An example:

Many thanx for thinking of me as a LinkedIn connection. Am honored.

I am into this LinkedIn thing by accident—having once been unpaid kibitzer to the publisher of a directory, which got me free listing in this LinkedIn thing and it won’t go away.

Alas, I do not understand what LinkedIn is, or how it works, or what it is supposed to do, so I simply do not deal with it.

So let me take a pass.

If this makes me a Luddite, so be it.

Thanx again for thinking of me.

Cheers.

No Mass E-mails. None. Ever.
Many people spend time at their computers surfing the Internet, find something that interests/amuses/moves them, and they forward it to 200 of their nearest and dearest friends. After sending this personal spam, they feel good about having done something worthwhile.

I do not have a mass e-mail list. I treat all e-mail correspondence as I would a personal snail-mail letter. I have never sent an e-mail to more than five people—unless it is a business thing where various people in a company are expecting copies.

OK, what am I doing wrong?

What should I be doing smarter?

Share your thoughts with me and other readers.

Remember, the comment length limit is 2,000 characters (including spaces).