Blog Comments: comments on my own blog go to my personal email. Ad hoc for following comments on other blogs (e.g., follow-ups when I comment).

Email: 2 accounts, one for work, one personal. I keep them in separate inboxes. While I’m using the same overall strategy with both, I do prioritize work over personal, e.g., my BlackBerry display shows me only how many unread work emails I have, but I have to put in more effort to see my unread personal mail.

Are you using the same strategy with multiple email addresses?

What’s your Twitter strategy and your blog comments strategy? Same as email?

I’ll be able to explain what I mean by all this more soon, really. I still have not had time to right up a project description for you (and a few others); the project is much more than this but takes into account the above, remember I am trying to replace your BlackBerry with an iPhone.

So little time so much to do.

Christopher

When you Process your Inbox, you deal with every item that takes 1-2 minutes to deal with (e.g. can be deleted, filed, responded to quickly, etc.). The ones that will take longer you put into Action. The point of Processing is to completely empty your Inbox.

You only really need to do this once a day or so, and it helps avoid the, “I’m just going to check my email again,” syndrome. When you have more time, you can knock a couple of the Action items out.

There’s a bit more to it, but I’ve found it extremely useful in my email habits.

I’m actually pretty good at prioritizing email once I read it; it’s the interrupts that kill me. So I’ve decided to take an approach of only committing to checking email once a day, without specifying when. In other words, I set the expectation that I will see an email within 24 hours of receiving it. For more urgent communication, I am telling people to use IM, SMS, and phone. I’m counting on people to exercise good judgment; if that fails, I’ll go back to the drawing board.

Will I be able to only check email once a day? Probably not at first–it’s a drastic change for me. But at least I’ll keep my email clients closed. And I’ve already modified my BlackBerry settings to only alert me (audibly and visually) for SMS and phone communications.

my supervisor tried the once a day email thing. i dont think she still does it. It certainly did have an affect on how she processed and even received emails. Most of the members of her team saved emails up till half an hour before her daily email reading time and sent them all at once. if you didnt get them in before 11, then you’d miss her for 24 hours! disaster. The system also failed when any of us were at a paper deadline or something, when we’d have input once a day. its not conducive to responding quickly to business.

instead what I’ve heard is a pretty good solution is the ‘i’ll do it tomorrow’ policy. rather than reacting and responding to emails quickly (unless really urgent), they get slotted into proper schedule on the next day. rather than affecting your schedule on the current day. again, im not sure how good this is for people who depend on email communication like many software companies.

i think also quitting your email application rather than switching/minimising helps me. that way i dont get the notification popping up (on a mac anyway) until i next choose to check my email. but i definately do that more than once or twice a day.

very interesting.

While some of the underlying algorithms are black box like in nature how we interact with them need not be. A good filtering system allows for a “conversation” with the data as everyones needs are different.

What you’re doing is slicing and dicing incoming data based on rules you create while interacting with the software. Nothing should be a surprise (i.e. why is this message here and not here.).

Also just like in facetted browsing a message can be in more than one filter view.

It’s a challenge but I think even a fully transparent, conversational filtering system can have some stellar benefits.

I’m personally a fan of attention bond approaches, but they’ve never taken off.

http://icd.si.umich.edu/twiki/pub/ICD/EmailMarkets/loder-vanalstyne-walshABM-BE-JEAP-final.pdf

http://www.si.umich.edu/stietold/posters/spam-igert-poster.pdf

Facetted Search I think can really lead the way architecturally (Big Picture).

Somethings are obviously different but the base concept of faceted filters in IR points the way towards how these new filters (for messaging data) could be envisioned.

Welcome back, hope you had a relaxing vacation.

What you are describing here is really an issue no matter what method of direct communication we use & will become a problem even in more social methods of communication if we do not stop worrying as much about “information overload” and start worrying about how filtering & routing of communications have not kept up with other innovations in the IR/IE space.

There will always be outliers (but they can be let through as a general rule) but I think what is really needed is better automated filtering, routing & clustering for communications style data; without it this morass of data will never be easily turned into information.

Christopher

P.S. Disclosure: I have a certain interest in the area of communications filtering (Hint to what is coming) so I am a little biased in my views of how we handle this type of stuff.