Front Office Box

I’m sure you’ll agree Email used to be the seventh wonder of the world – in days when snail mail was the norm.  A bit like IM was two years ago, and Twitter DMs were last year.  Now it’s just the biggest time waster in our lives.

A couple of days ago Chris Brogan explained in Get Your Emails Answered he gets 600 Emails each day and if he spent one minute on each that would total ten hours of continuous effort on his part..  There’s not much productivity there.

I don’t get that many, maybe I get fifty or sixty, including a bunch from services I should “unsubscribe” but that’s still a lot when there’s long list of productive things to do.  On top of those I get around 200 updates in my Google Reader.  Luckily few people IM me these days and the majority of DM’s I get are spam which I ignore.

If I add the Emails, relevant DMs, IMs and Reader updates to my site reports the total will come to between three hundred and four hundred a day.  That’s a lot of items to look at, let alone read. So I’ve needed to find a way of managing my way through it.

The day starts at 6.00am when I’ll check site reports, email and Reader on my iPhone.  I’ll be lying in bed trying to hide the phone from my wife, usually unsuccessfully.  During the day, regardless of what I’m doing the constant stream of stuff continues.  After dinner we’ll watch TV, and I’ll keep up with the stream – mostly Twitter at that time.

There just isn’t a sensible way responding in a timely fashion and getting anything else done.

The way I cope with this is I scan.  If the item absolutely needs a response I’ll do it there and then. If it needs some response, but not this minute urgent, or if it’s something I need to check out, I’ll put it in a box.

In my case this is my Front Office Box.  Forwarding the item to my xxxxxxxxx@frontofficebox.com address will ensure I don’t forget it, as happens in my Inbox.  Next time I go to my Dashboard it’s staring me in the face.

It’s also in the place where I do my work – planning, scheduling and managing relationships.

I don’t need to remember because my Front Office Box won’t let me forget. And the item is where it should be – where all my relationship management, planning and scheduling gets done.

October 5th, 2009 - Posted in Front Office Box  |  Add a Comment