When I was younger I attended every leadership seminar and workshop you can imagine. I’m not sure how they came up, whether my parents had enrolled me or not, but I went to them all. One of the more common lessons or exercises involved a piece of paper that seemed to look like a blank school timetable. The schedule was actually for the entire week, and was blank aside from listing the times of day on the left hand column and the days of the week across the top. I remember doing this same exercise regularly- at least a few times a year.

The goal of the exercise was to mark in scheduled activities during the week like work and sleep, and then to visually impress upon you how much time you have in the run of a week in which you cannot account for. Although designed as a means to fit in extra curricular activities along with school work, it is certainly a useful exercise for anyone challenged by productivity and have difficulty scheduling their work day.

As an experiment for a day or a week, try breaking your day down into 10 or even 15-minute chunks. A lawyer friend was explaining to me that for billing purposes, his day was filled with organising every last 10 minutes as much as possible, maximizing his yearly billing hours. I remember him telling me that although he was physically in the office for often 10-12 hours a day, actually billing an eight hour day was rare. What do you do with your time at work? Toilet breaks, chats with friends or assistants and even coffee breaks add up. Now please note that I am not suggesting that everyone must do eight hours of work per day, I am merely suggesting that when challenged for time think about how you could better schedule your day.

Welcome the new Google Inbox. We all know that e-mail takes up a significant amount of time in our daily lives, and that the new Google Inbox will help us manage our e-mail time.

The addition of mail prioritisation in Gmail is very exciting and is receiving a great deal of press. It’s trending on Twitter and all of Gmail’s heavy users are thinking about how to best organise the hundreds of e-mails they receive every day. With risk of sounding cynical (and I am a true Gmail user and will be using the new system of prioritisation) please consider some of the points below. The new prioritisation system is obviously innovative and will change the way we use e-mail.

Less likely to forget e-mail
We all get daily e-mail messages that are important but not urgent. I myself have been guilty of “replying and archiving” a message that I intended to keep in my inbox as a reminder, when I meant to just “reply”. The new prioritisation and scheduling of e-mails means that it is less likely that you will loose or misplace an e-mail, depending on how much control you give the filters, ensuring that e-mails from your boss never get mixed up with the “remind in 2 weeks” tabs.

E-mail procrastination
The new e-mail prioritisation system makes way for an entirely new form of e-mail procrastination. Some argue that 24 hours is a fair length of time to respond to a non-urgent e-mail, but others argue that the length should be 1-2 hours during business hours. With e-mails out of sight (ie. Temporarily out of your inbox,) out of mind, how long will we leave them? Let’s say Monday lunchtime I designate half of my e-mails to return again Tuesday morning. They weren’t urgent, so I’ll address them with my morning coffee. Will that be an effective use of my time? Tuesday morning (as every morning) you will still open your inbox to find the usual day’s e-mails, in addition to all the ones that you saw on Monday and asked to return on Tuesday.

Apparently Google’s amazing algorithms will be able to automatically predict what is urgent and what is less urgent, and file them accordingly. Like an automatic assistant, this service will need to develop the trust of users to truly be effective.

Is the Google e-mail prioritisation simply giving us permission to procrastinate longer when replying to our e-mails? Will we simply get overwhelmed in a cycle where we respond urgent e-mails now, and less urgent e-mails in a few days?
Other than revising how we manage e-mails, I don’t anticipate having to spend less time responding to e-mails, and I don’t expect you’ll be able to either.

Tags: e-mail, Gmail, inbox, prioritisation, prioritization, time management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 9:12 am and is filed under Weird and wonderful. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.