Lingering emails

Perhaps the most time I personally spend on email is staring at lingering emails. I bet I average about 5 of them at any given time. Emails that are just sitting there and I know they need some kind of action or response, I just can’t get it done for whatever reason. Maybe I don’t know what to say yet. Maybe I just can’t spend the time right now on what it needs.

For at least the last fifteen years I’ve kept an inbox close to zero. Currently I’m sitting at the supposedly magical number.

I like it that way.

But sometimes a few emails also start to linger. I like to think of them as festering.

I’m not clear on what action to take, not clear on the steps required, and tend to stare at the emails dozens of times until I come to some resolution.

I either force myself to deal with it or move what needs to be done somewhere else, like a TODO list. In rare cases I just delete it.

Sometimes I will move emails to my TODO list. Then I have another place to stare at it, but at least it’s a single place that I reprioritize daily.

Tomorrow I have 13 items on my TODO list. Four of them are recurring. Six of them I can tell you right now I won’t get to.

That said, I consider them things I want to do and I don’t want to forget them. So I keep shifting them forward a day or two at a time until they become critical to deal with (or drop off entirely).

Glad to hear I’m not the only one who struggles with this.

Via Chris Coyier.