Someone has been having entirely too much fun.
Archive for June, 2007
Ants in Second Life
Saturday, June 30th, 2007Lost email
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
If you sent me email in the last week few months and I never responded, please accept my apology and send your email again. While trying to reduce the level of incoming spam, I screwed up something in my email filtering rules, causing a bunch of non-spam email to go *poof* before it even made it to my laptop. While fixing the problem, I found (and fixed) another, much narrower hole that’s been there for much longer. Oops.
On the plus side, getting my inbox down to zero this week was very easy.
“Find a way to unit test .procmail rules” has been added to the TO DO list. Plan B is to move everything over to gmail.
Email triage
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007- 0:00:00
- It’s time. Grab the stopwatch, pack the laptop, and head out the door.
- 0:09:21
- Sit down at a local coffee shop (one without wireless) with a cup of coffee and a muffin, and inventory the damage. Starting point: 63 emails in the inbox, 32 in @followup. The largest clump of messages (23) is from two weeks ago, which is when things got really bad. I’m fairly aggressive about dealing with emails “above the fold” (i.e., the new ones), but when they slip into need-to-scroll land, they risk getting stuck.
- 0:13:35
- Catch myself in the trap of spending time giving thoughtful responses instead of triaging. The inbox is at 54. Re-commence filing and discarding.
- 0:38:26
- Inbox is at zero! @followup now has 40 messages, the outbox has 2, and I’ve scribbled down 4 action items on paper. Not as bad as I’d expected, at least so far. Now to cull @followup.
- 0:50:55
- After applying the “is there really a next step here that I care about taking?” test to everything in @followup, the count is now at 15. A few emails represented possibilities that had expired. One message is two years old, but it’s an outlier that really should go on a “someday, maybe” list.
- 1:02:49
- @followup is down to 13, with 2 more emails in the outbox. Of what’s left, half require network access. Two are requests that I’m conflicted about, but will probably say “No” to. The remaining stuff in @followup represents 2-3 hours of work. Not as bad as I’d expected.
- 1:41:23
- Finished a second cup of coffee, and some other laptop cleanup. I must have zoned out for a while; it doesn’t feel like a half-hour has passed.
- 2:00:55
- Back at home, with wireless connectivity. 8 new emails; 7 are spam. The other requires a few minutes of investigation before dispatching.
- 2:12:52
- One @followup was to renew a domain registration, which required shuffling through some paperwork. I won’t have to worry about that one for another 5 years.
- 2:17:49
- One @followup was about an updated PDF for the Pragmatic Programmer’s Rails book, which required digging up my customer number. Meanwhile, the emails that I sent 17 minutes ago have already generated two responses. Doesn’t anyone have a life? Reply to one of them.
- 2:25:14
- Filing expenses on-line rocks. Down to 11 in @followup.
- 2:29:29
- Catch myself web surfing. Bad Dave. Meanwhile 2 more spams got through the filter.
- 2:37:18
- Started to deal with another @followup, but it’s one that needs some thinking before I can decide which way to go, and I’m out of time this morning. The @followup count is still at 11.
My email management pattern for the past few months has been to let it build up during the week—where “let it build up” means being aggressive without losing sleep—and then to use weekend mornings to get dug out from under—where “dug out from under” means getting my inbox down to zero, with anything active moved into either @followup or @pending. But my inbox hasn’t touched zero in over a month. Part of the problem recently has been failing spam filters, which has raised the nuisance factor.
The weekend starts tomorrow. The current count is 67 messages in the inbox, 32 in @followup, and 2 in @pending. (And 2,800+ messages in @readingpile, consisting mostly of newsletters and mailing list digests.) With past performance as an indicator, I expect to sink about 2 hours this weekend into getting my inbox to zero and 2-3 more dealing with stuff that needs to be followed up on. This doesn’t count making progress on various projects that need attention, though email slinging overlaps nicely with the pre-folding stages of the laundry pipeline. The reading pile—with past performance as an indicator—won’t get touched.
I’m gaining new sympathies with people who’ve sent curt replies when I expected longer, more thoughful responses. I have more “thoughtful reply” obligations that I have time right now.