KW1802 – Intentional Email

On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go.

Welcome to Nightwise.com.

On the edge of real and cyberspace, there's one place you can go and you've found it.

Welcome back to the second episode of the 18th season of the Nightwise.com podcast,

where we let technology work for you instead of the other way around.

I am Nightwise, your host for today.

And on the other side of the planet, nine hours behind my local time,

is the fantastic Katie Murray.

Good evening, Keith.

Good morning, Mr. Nightwise.

Good morning.

How are you doing this fine early morning?

I am doing just great.

I've been up since 4.30.

Why?

Yes.

Ew.

Yes.

I got awoken rudely.

By a whining sound coming through the bedroom window.

And it was my robot lawnmower that was actually stuck on a root in the middle of the garden

and decided to make a lot of noise.

It inadvertently had started up its auto mowing cycle at the middle of the night

and ran amok at 4.30 a.m., at which time I did not go to sleep again.

No.

That would probably keep me awake.

That would probably keep me up as well.

The wonders of technology.

So I just dashed outside onto the lawn, flipped the thing,

and will reprogram its clock sometime later today.

Keith.

Inconvenience caused by a CMOS battery failure.

Yes.

Actually, yes.

Yes.

And the laziness of the operator that just went through the setup cycle like,

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and didn't set the clock.

Oh, the tyranny of the default.

I think we talked about that.

There we go.

Aroused by technology and tech's on our mind, as always.

So today, Keith, what are we going to talk about?

It was a suggestion that you had that this is something we should deal with in the show.

So in the spirit of visiting things that require intentionality to manage them

and to make them even,

slightly, not terrifyingly, terribly inefficient,

we are going to have a chat today about the bane of most people's existence,

email.

Oh, email.

All right.

Just a quick count before we had.

Number of unread emails in inbox today.

If you have to check.

How many?

For the listeners, same thing.

Check now.

My personal home email.

Is zero unread.

Yep.

My work email when I quit this afternoon, I think, was 700.

700 unread emails.

Personal email.

We'll get to that, though.

Okay.

We'll get to that.

That's kind of deliberate.

You just use it.

I will let, I will let 700 unread emails gather just to, you know, have something to talk about on the show.

For me, personal emails unread, I think, four or five, which is mostly newsletters and company emails unread about 11, which all accounts to one person who decided to send me an email storm yesterday at 730 in the, in the evening, which I still need to get through.

So I should stipulate.

I was only talking about unreads in my, in my inbox.

The ones that are not in the inbox do not exist, but we're getting ahead of ourselves, but again, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

All right.

Before we dive into it, just now quickly, the rules, the rules of, um, the nightwise.com podcast episodes, which we kind of pulled out of our, uh, behinds, uh, last time is that digital intentionalism has three major approaches.

Okay.

Three major rules to how you approach technology.

Uh, digital intentionalism means that at first we will have to state what we want to do with said technology.

Hence this being email, where we're going to talk about what we want to achieve with email.

In the next part, we're going to talk about our strategies.

How do we approach that intent?

How do we think about it?

How do we, um, set our requirements?

What do we expect from?

Um, email and dealing with email clients, and then we're going to dive into the technology of handling emails, clients, folder structure, and so forth.

So the rules are pretty simple and always have to start off with one simple question, which at home listeners or wherever you are, uh, you can pose yourself to that, uh, that question today as well.

And that is Katie Murray.

What's to you is email.

Actually for.

I'm going to have to split a lot of my answers into two pieces because I use email very differently at work and outside of work because I work a corporate jobby job.

Um, I don't have, I don't have, you've kind of got a situation where, you know, with your own company and your consultancy and all that stuff, like a lot of like work and non-work kind of, I think tends to the strategies overlap because you can use the same.

Same strategies in a lot of cases.

Um, I have some limitations based on, uh, the, the company that I work for and where, and how things work there, uh, on, on how that goes and in the big giant company that I work for, um, email is still the main way of officially communicating anything.

Oh, you're getting ahead of yourself.

You're basically saying what email is for.

Uh, I'm, I'm going to paraphrase.

Okay.

I'm going to reiterate my question.

What do you, what is your intention?

What do you want to do with email?

What do I want to do with email?

Yes.

Uh.

I put it in a bin.

I know, but you know, I mean, yeah.

Survive it.

Yes.

Not lose anything important that happens to come in through email.

Okay.

And send as few multi-recipient emails as possible.

Okay.

That's and that actually, I would say does apply to both work and not work.

All right.

So one level, even, even one level above, okay.

Let's say email was a new technology that was, was invented yesterday.

And there they come to you and they say, Keith, look at this.

This is email.

What would you use it for?

What would you want to, what do you want to achieve with it?

I guess it depends if we're saying this is coming into a world where.

All of my other communication technologies already exist or not, because

this is the child, this is the challenge with email is it came in at a time

where there wasn't much else and it managed to burrow its way into our

psyches and our processes, um, at a time when it was not just the best option,

but really in most cases, the only option if email were to be invented today, it's

entering a very crowded.

World and I think all of it's failings become much more obvious, much more quickly.

Yes.

And no, um, if we're going to take a look at email us historically, um, being, being,

uh, um, married to, to a lovely wife with great taste, I of course had to endure the

second season of Bridgerton, right?

The, the, the, the, well, let's call it.

Soft porn with Corsets, right?

Uh, totally historically inaccurate time piece about, uh, the late 18th, beginning

of the 19th century, you know, about the, uh, the English upper-class, the

bon vivants, uh, basically royalty or, or nobility passing the time, humping each

other.

That's what the show is about.

If you haven't watched it historical in square quotes,

historical fiction, but historical small world, small word fiction, big word, you know,

if you, if you are a history buff, don't watch it, you'll be foaming at the mouth, but, um,

why Bridgerton, or I could say Downton Abbey as well.

That's that's okay.

That's a time piece as well.

That's a little bit more historically accurate.

Communication is done through Papa, a letter has arrived and the letter comes and they

just open up the letter with a little knife and they read the letter.

And then they go to their room and they reply to the letter.

And for them, uh, email and the post is picked up twice a day or more and for them, uh, a

letter was the only way to communicate formally with people outside their direct, uh, line

of sight.

Right.

When I take a look at email for me, I kind of take a look at the same thing.

I, for me, email is a.

Formal way to asynchronously communicate with people.

And that's, yeah.

So that's how I look at email.

I look at email at something that you write down black on white officially, and you send

it to somebody outside of your direct line of sight, direct line of communication.

Okay.

And, um, it is asynchronous.

So I have no.

I'm going to play your game.

I'm going to play your game now.

Okay.

Play my game.

Okay.

You're getting into how you use it, why, what do you, what do you want to do with it?

What is the goal of email?

The goal of email is to communicate with people and collaborate with people in a formal, in

a formal setting.

Okay.

So that means I will not send email to somebody who is sitting for, I will not send email

to my wife who works in the company that I work in, in the other end of the office.

If it's not information that can be conveyed directly.

So it's something of, when you say formal, this is something that we're saying needs

to be in writing.

There you go.

That's for me.

For me, the intention of email is actually the same thing as the letter in Bridgerton

or in, in Downton Abbey, something that is set in writing and can be kept for historical

reference.

Okay.

That's digital record keeping digital record of, of, of a piece of text that if on paper

you could roll out, roll up around a little lead pipe and smack somebody.

Yeah.

On the head with saying, you wrote this, this is what we agreed on.

So that's, that's my intention with, with email.

Okay.

So, so are you along the same lines?

Yeah.

And I, and I think, you know, avoiding your question of what would I do with, if it was

invented today?

Yeah.

I mean, I think email certainly fills the role of more formal communication.

Mm-hmm .

Yeah.

You know, I, it is, I would have to say if I were to, if I were to be honest here,

if I were to approach it, if I were to try to across email, I'd probably like, I would

like to say I'm gonna go through the longer version of email.

I think it's pretty easy to think of the shorter version, but not so much.

And sometimes you know, if you're looking for a long term, maybe I'll try to go over

email to you, but it's, it's, you know, I'm doing it.

I'm not good at text to email.

Yeah.

But you're not going to be able to get better at text to email.

Yeah.

I don't think I have the time to read that.

Or I think you're doing it.

I think it's a, it's a.

means at which they want to be reached or share other accounts, names, or

whatever, right, they may not want to give you their, their discord or

their telegram or whatever, but you can pretty well count on everybody's

got an email that they're willing to share.

They may have more than one for that reason, but it's a, it's a mechanism

where at this point, there's enough free email services in the world that

everyone has an email or 12.

Yeah, for me, the other part that's really important is the asynchronous part.

Yeah.

So I send it to you when I want, and you can reply on your own time.

And for that email for me has an enormous value because it's on my time.

Especially if you get woken up by the lawnmower at four 30 and you can have

your first emails on the, out the door by five, you are one step ahead of the

world.

Cause you are, you're, you got your stuff out there and that's it.

You know, it's on the mail and we'll see it come.

And we're going to get to that too, because that's another, yeah, that's

another approach.

There's a, yeah, that, that way lies madness as well, but email, we'll get

there, we'll get there much wisdom.

What, what email to me and that, those are the things that I wrote down.

So, so email is a communication tool for me.

Yeah.

Formal communication tool.

It's not.

And.

I've been around the block for 20 years in the IT.

So I've seen a lot of people do email, uh, kind of like a bean counting

system where, um, in the old days in the industrial revolution.

Yeah.

You, you, you, you, you used to, you know what, uh, you made widgets, you

know, and your productivity was, um, was, uh, measured by the number of

widgets that you made within set amount of time.

So I've seen people.

Count the number of sent emails or received emails as kind of a widget counter.

And we're like, yeah, look how hard I work.

Look how hard it'll work.

This, you can count the number of unread emails, which was, which is a sign of the

fact that you're either not good at managing the communications that you get, or that you're

damn right.

Lazy was also a sign of kind of corporate machoism on how busy you were.

I've got like 1200 unread emails and it would like boast, like, look at how many

emails that I get, look at how important that I have.

I've got, I've definitely guilty of having used that technique in the past, but

yeah, I always thought it was paradoxical because it's like, you know, these are the

number of requests for information or requests for communications that have blatantly ignored.

So I was, I always thought it was funny.

So it's not, it's not.

I would like to see how many would show up after a vacation.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And then it's shift, delete, do the entire thing.

Shift, delete.

Nope.

But we'll get there.

Okay.

We'll get there.

But what I, what I did notice though, random aside for on the vacation thing, whether I took a week off or whether I took three and a half, four weeks off.

Yeah.

The number of unread emails after about a week doesn't change drastically.

Cause you're out of offices dealing with it.

People, other people, people stop sending you an email.

Never turn it off.

Amazing.

That's a strategy.

That first week spikes.

That's the first week spikes.

And then it's like, no, we don't need to.

The second thing that email is not to me is, and I should, I should, well, it's also kind of an archiving system where some relevant and important deals are, are stored.

But.

That's basically not the place where email should be.

You know, email is a flu is to me, a timely communication method, but you have people that archive the shit out of their email, right?

They, they, yeah.

Yeah.

Keith raises hand.

Um, I have agreements that if they are important enough, I will formalize them in another way than just by an email.

Because if it's really,

if it's really important, yeah, you got the email and it's nice to cover your ass, but it's also not an archiving system of, of your history.

I've got like 10 years of, of business emails archived.

I, I, and I don't know that if it's the right thing, I think that email should be a little bit more fluent than that.

And if a document is really important enough to, to, to keep for prosperity, it probably shouldn't be in your PST file.

Well, I think we're confusing two things though.

Oh, go ahead.

There's email and there's documents.

Oh, sorry.

As, as an documents I'm getting through in, in, in a couple of seconds, but let's say just emails, just, you know, you and me, we, we send an email back and forth and we make this really, really, really important decision that we should hold on to for years to come.

Shouldn't probably be in an email.

It should be in a formal document.

Correct.

Contract.

Yeah.

Emails are not contracts.

No.

Yeah.

Um, but email archiving though is amazing for those.

I'm sure I talked to somebody about that three years ago.

Yeah.

Right.

It's the, it's the serendipity effect.

It's the, uh, I think I talked to somebody about that.

I don't know when didn't seem super critical at the time, but there's this, it's this nugget of information that I know probably exists in my email.

Yeah.

It's, it's, I'm not going to, I'm not going to sit there and archive and document and, you know, PDF every email I get in case it might be important someday.

Right.

The obviously important stuff.

Yeah.

Take it out of your email.

The rest of it.

Take it out of your email.

That's, that's the other one.

Um, I've worked with small businesses for, for about 20 years.

I am frightened at the number of people who would use their PST files.

For, for non-Microsofty guys, PSD file used to be the place that would be one file where all of your emails were stored in and it was basically stored sync locally on your PC.

If that thing got too big or it got corrupt, you would, you, you would lose your entire inbox.

Right.

Back in the old days, this file should, could grow to about two gigs.

And then because of that, you were very brave.

Yeah.

You were very brave.

Two gigs.

And then the classic fat file system said, you know what?

Let's kill it.

Even, even NTFS didn't like the bigger, the two gig files.

I had a, I had a rule back on the exchange days that I archived.

I split my PST files at one gig.

Yeah.

But people, you know, and two gigs for just mail.

Fine.

But it, you know, completely goes to shit when you put attachments in it.

And people would start using email as a file system, which was the road to, you have one road to Matt.

There are multiple roads to madness.

There was one highway to disaster.

And that was storing, using email kind of as your CRM and as your file system.

Yeah.

Which.

I had lots of attachments in my PST files, but they were there for one reason.

Yeah.

One reason to one reason only.

Laziness.

I was not going to sit there and extract the attachments out of all my PST files.

Like I don't have that kind of time to sit there and pick attachments off and delete them out of my, out of the emails before I archive them.

Like, no, no.

Golden rule.

When clients send me attachments that I need to keep out of the email into the file system under that client's name.

Yep.

Especially this, this becomes very interesting when you have multiple people working around a certain client.

And you've got like logos and stuff coming in, you take that thing, you, you extract it, you put it in the right folder.

You get it out of your mail.

Yeah.

Um, not a good,

hopefully you don't, hopefully you're not sending emails with attachments.

You're sending emails with links to files posted in the shared file services.

But again, we're, we're deep diving here and we need to get back to the, uh, to the metric hat.

So, so email for me in one, in one sentence, long form, black and white.

Formal communications that need to be sent asynchronously and might be needed.

We might need to keep them for prosperity.

Right.

Let's let's just formalize them.

Um, I can agree with that.

Okay.

Um, how about that?

That was just business, personal email.

Any, any, any, do you yield other question?

Do you still use personal email?

Constantly.

But the volume.

But the volume is one to 4% of what I deal with at work.

My actual emails that come into my personal account that I have to action on a daily basis is between one and six.

Hmm.

I'm when it comes to personal use, I'm starting to see the Bridgerton effect really take effect.

On my personal inbox where I actually, you know, love to take the time to write up an email and send it to somebody because most of my personal interactions are done directly via, via instant messaging and stuff.

So for me, uh, personal email is becoming this, this, you know, this, this, this kind of pen pal sort of thing.

Really weird.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

That's, that's, yeah.

Or I don't have that.

Yeah.

Or I don't have a personal life anymore.

That's also an option.

Yeah.

So I was going to say, uh, the majority of the email that I get that I have to deal with personally now is almost a second job for the volunteering work I do.

Oh yeah.

There you go.

There's this, you and I've talked about the debacle that I'm dealing with at the moment.

And a lot of that is probably 80% of my personal email right now.

It's that.

But personal, personal.

Personal email, you know, to dear Keith.

When I say personal, I'm talking about my, my personal Gmail account and that's where that's all run through.

Yeah.

But, but in outside.

Personal, personal stuff.

Now we're talking one a day, maybe less.

Not even getting there.

The, the real dear night wise, comma, I listened to your show and I think that Keith is much, much, much more interesting to listen to than you are.

Shift delete.

But, you know.

Um, that, that kind of stuff, almost nothing, the feedback at nightwise.com mailbox, almost nothing.

It's like email doesn't exist anymore there.

So now we're going to get to the strategy.

Very transactional emails become very transactional.

Yes.

It's, it's most, uh, do this, do that here, hap, hap, hap, but not about writing each other anymore.

The romance, the romance of email has.

Kind of faded.

Away.

Like the bing, you got mail, like the movie email.

And that's it.

That's faded away by the time Gmail launched.

Yeah.

This, this, the, the thing that you would get an email, it would be exciting is a concept alien to a lot of people these days.

Yep.

Oh, exactly.

I mean, it's, uh, you know, we went not to, not to divert too far off the topic, but.

Phone calls followed a similar path.

Getting a phone call used to be exciting.

Then it got to the point where getting a phone call was an annoyance because you would just get so many of them all the time.

And now it's now a phone call.

Well, yeah, I mean, not even so much terror, but it's, I don't get phone calls.

My dad calls me on a business.

I get bad calls.

And.

That's about it.

My kid once in a while will call me when they're not home, but like phone calls are, is now I, I treat them as a very formal thing.

I don't call somebody personally, unless I text them first and say, Hey, are you free for a call?

Right.

It's an intrusion.

I don't want to get unsolicited phone calls, so I don't want to be that guy who was giving unsolicited phone calls.

And I think email's kind of following that same path.

But a decade or two behind become a thing where I think before I send somebody an email, I'm just going to dump email at somebody without, you know, outside of work because again, that's a whole other thing.

But in a business setting, I call people all the time.

It is incredible what you can get done with, with my wife.

Yeah.

And most of my outgoing phone calls are to businesses.

Yeah.

Um, on a personal.

My wife's family call each other regularly, but my wife, but on a business side, my wife would email the fire department, dear fire department.

It looks like there's a lot of smoke coming out of the house and some orangey stuff.

That's very hot.

Might you want to inquire to see when it would be okay to come by with those little fire trucks and the blue lights?

You don't have to put the sirens on.

Let me know if you're interested, comma.

She emails.

She would.

I, I dread the efficiency, but basically phone calls is a new show is a different topic, but, um, I call people a lot faster than she does because I think it's, it's more efficient than using it, but that's strategy.

We're, we're getting there.

So, so, all right, good.

We're, we're going to, to, to strategy.

So my next question is Keith, in what situation do you use email?

So there's two.

Yeah.

So we're going to, the strategy for sending first and the strategy for managing later and sending, reading and managing.

Okay.

All right.

So sending, uh, only when my purpose lines up with the goal we talked about earlier.

Okay.

I send email when it needs to be a formal piece of communication that needs to be in writing and.

Asynchronous is going to work best.

Yes.

Agree.

That's when the email goes up.

Okay.

Right.

I will, I will occasionally email my dad, but not very often because we call, we would call each other or text each other or, you know, have much more real time types of exchanges.

Um, if I'm going to talk to the, you know, uh, director at the place I volunteer at, that is all going in an email.

Okay.

Because the conversations that I have with him are the same.

I'm going to tell you the things that need to be written down and documented and probably then.

In some cases, PDF and archived the CTA email on the way out.

Yes.

CTA.

I really try to manage.

Not even that it's decisions that were made and they need to be logged.

No, no, no.

Not, not call to action.

The CTA emails are covered by ass email.

Yes.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't think they're that they're, they're more in the case of, I want to document this.

this decision was made and put it in the place where other people can find it okay but so that's

outgoing incoming wait i'll go next and then okay let's go yeah let's do that let's do that because

otherwise it's going to be way too simple for our listeners we don't want that um outgoing um same

thing uh something that needs to be agreed on like a date or do you these these are the links to the

socials that i made for you can you please reply and say if it's okay stuff like that things that

are a little bit more complex to get through like multiple links that they need to check not like do

you like the color blue yes no so that would probably go through a chat or something but uh

something to formally agree on or a complex piece of information that that doesn't need to be replied

right away people need to take their time to reply to you so that's something that needs to be

time to get through it and i'll need to have their attention i don't want to intrude but i will send

that out asynchronously that's that's when i use email that's yeah yeah so i'd say the other place

i send email now if i get if i look get out of the personal things and look at you know what i do at

work professionally for emails so working in it in a big company there's a lot of email there's

a lot of slack there's a lot of google chat there's a lot of yeah those three i mean that's

those three are 90 of it right

video calls you know google google me calls or whatever regular phone calls almost never now

almost almost never right it's almost all google meet for for real time face to face have a chat

you know mostly everybody's remote so you know we're doing you know the amount of time we sit

in a room with somebody so very low so it's almost all async and even things like google chat and a

and slack depending on like google chat is a you know instant message tech it's basically one you

know it's a desktop technology it's a desktop technology it's a desktop technology it's a

text messaging right that's it it's very very synchronous slack is weird because it's in this

middle ground because you have you have channels right like our like our nightwise discord right

i'll post something in the discord uh somebody will see it eventually right somebody somebody

might be interested and they'll they'll get to it eventually right i'm not expecting you or dan or

somebody to come back and reply to something i post in the discord right away slack i think in

a lot of cases unless it's it's

direct message um you know channels in slack are very asynchronous and then email

is very very asynchronous and not everybody's in slack and not everybody's on google chat

and a lot of it is stuff that you're saying okay we had this meeting and here's the formal

documentation of this meeting right so back to documenting something that was done telling

people formally asynchronously you know it's it is similar the volumes are just

off to 11 with slack and chat and teams and all that crap you just put it in the channel and

that's it when i send you an email you will not have the luxury to say i didn't read that i didn't

know so kid i sent you that in an email i know you're busy but this was important because if it's

blab i'll put it in the chat but if it's important information i'll put it in a mail that was for me

as a project manager back in the day the way i used to to take it and i'll put it in the chat

so i'll be able to pick that around

yep so that's and as long as everybody understands those rules it works yeah and same thing

we got a half a dozen slack channels that are thou shalt not miss the messages in this

channel we don't use them very often and they're used for very specific things okay right because

you can tie them in to github for example yeah so you run a program you're running a

process, GitHub does something, it fails, it's going to post a message in Slack.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's, that's very specific channel. It's an isolated thing because for the

same reason you said people miss things in Slack and that's why I sent it as an email.

We don't send that as an email because there's too much email. I don't want it to get buried.

So we put it in a specific channel. So, and there's, it all has to do with, you know,

corporate culture and how you manage it and whatever, because I'm also in over a hundred

Slack channels. It's donkulous. That's the nice one that when you have a formal chat channel,

I always say like, for example, you have the, the, the GitHub dumping a message in there and

you have to be aware that that's happening in that channel. There is no chit chat. There is

no shooting the shit. There is no blah, blah, blah. There is no overhead.

There's just that.

And there are penalties.

Yes. For me.

There is public embarrassment penalties for, for breaking those rules.

Yeah. It's like, you know, the, the good old days of CB radio or walkie talkie radio,

where it would be like, get off the channel. And, and I remember I'm that old. I remember

those days when I was with the Belgian red cross and I'd be a radio operator. And then you hand

out like seven walkie talkies to a bunch of 19 year olds.

That have, that I've never seen this technology and that sound very important when they use it.

And I would need to moderate those channels because it would like,

it's sunny out here. How's it, how's it your end? And I would literally go, you know,

um, I would have to moderate that channel, like clear off the channel. Uh, same thing with,

with, with Slack and messages. If you do that, that's great. The other way around is also true

for me.

Email is not for chit chat. I hate people who send like, yeah, I agree on that one. Like,

or, or, or, oh, I, the way to back in the day to defriend me was to send me these spammy emails

with memes and shit, you know, back, back in the days before social media, people would use hotmail

to send funnies and, and presentations and stuff. If you would send me that, you would,

actually,

after you would get a quicker reply saying like, look, that's not what I'm using email for. Please

don't send me this. If you would persist, I would, I still have emails of those replies in my

mailbox where I actually really go off on a, on a tangent going like, stop. So yeah, not for emails,

not for funnies, no funnies in mail.

Yeah. Not, not to get down on a tangent, but people replying all telling people to stop

replying all.

Oh God.

So anyway, that's enough that we're not going to go further. Yeah. Yeah. We all, we all know what

that is. We all know the pain of it. Yeah. We'll leave it there. So sending email, reading, sending

emails, one thing, how do you, how do you, how do you check your emails? When do you check your

emails? So frequently I would say I have personal emails. I have email notification turned on.

Yeah.

I don't get enough of, I don't get enough of them, but that's a problem.

Okay.

But I, I also only get notifications on my phone. I don't do desktop notifications for perhaps.

Okay.

So I check it frequently at work, you know, once an hour, every 90 minutes I'm, I'm in there,

you know, dealing with, I typically I'm going to look for a particular message that I will,

I'm expecting to have arrived in that last hour.

Okay.

Right. I'm going into, I'm going,

I'm going into my email for a reason, which is why when I talk about those 700 unread emails,

a lot of those are stuff that was sent to me that I don't care that it was sent to me.

So there again, in a company like this, we get a lot of stuff that's,

I'm on mailing lists. I've been in this company for 20 years. I'm on distribution lists.

Oh God. Yeah. The marketing department has something to tell about the new Cocker.

spaniel from our c not even not even that man it's like it's like oh i'm on distribution lists

that are getting copies of alerts that this system sends out that it's a system i don't i'm not

involved with anymore but that distribution list is used for more than one thing so i get those

because i need to be on it for something else yeah so there are i got rules in my email that

handled the filtering for a lot of that stuff so when there's you know a consistent pattern i'm

like oh i'm getting a bunch of these i'll add some but we're getting into truly i won't talk

about that um basic management though is is scanning through what's come in being able to

identify pretty well what i actually need to read and care about and ignoring a lot of the rest

and i try to not have too many get unread and we'll go through whatever's there from that last

hour

that i don't need and click click click click click archive gone sounds like you're sounds like

you're you're looking for the essence of your mails i am yeah i am filtering i'm i'm i'm digging

through the um soup pot of my email and trying to pick out all the good vegetables okay

okay i heard you say there

when i go into my email i thought that was a very archaic way of of um putting it but a very

interesting one like i'm going to go onto the internet i'm going i'm going to go onto the

internet when i when i alt tab over to the gmail tab which is always open it's always open which

is why it's all tab i have started yeah i have started to close

i've i've 20 years in corporate you know where especially as a pm opening outlook was the first

thing i did yeah it took 45 minutes i know but there was you had to leave it open i worked for

a boss i worked for a wonderful guy who really went through the transformation of managing

a remote workforce and and um and having to deal with with new technologies and new ways of doing

things mostly because of the technology and the technology and the technology and the technology

i i forced him onto the company so he got very he got very um he's probably still listening jack

reese if you're listening this are you still listening that's that's great um he he um he

always said like you know email is really important you have to have it open you have to see it and and

not having your email open at at a point was a question mark for like what are you doing

you're not seeing that email that i sent you no i don't have outlook

open what what then what are you doing and then i went like wait a minute email is not a core

activity of this company is it it's one would say email is not your job there you go and but

a lot of people back to the widgets and bolts think it is dealing with email is your job and

especially as a pm in in bigger companies where i used to work yes email used to be your day-to-day

thing um and handling that inbox was an activity uh which was insane if you think of it but yeah

um i today tried to close down my mail the client on my pc or on my mac or on my whatever

i still have notifications that i get new mails on my phone should customers so i i'm i'm aware

that i get something

but i don't want to have it actionable open all the time because i use email to do my work and

my email does not dictate which work i do that that to me is is an important strategy to have

it out of the way so we do the same thing except i just the window is still open i try to close the

window i don't have so i've got the notifications turned off oh yeah for work emails the only way

is when i flip over to that tab and look at the inbox for me there's no notifications on my phone

there's no notifications anywhere else the only way to know is for me to go okay it's time for me

to go and look at the email program and see if the thing i'm waiting for has arrived so it's like

waiting for an amazon package yeah the the the the crux of the matter that to me really pulled

email the wrong way into into also in the corporate space was the fact that i was not able to get the

at some point thank you i think outlook because outlook express didn't have that was the

integration of your calendar that totally threw the use of email into a warped sense of always

needing to be there because you weren't using email you were using outlook you were using you

needed outlook to have your calendar open you know to to see what your next appointment would be

and having an integrated application that does both mail and calendar to me is the biggest

bane on your productivity that you can have because the new messages that come in and the

time at which they come in take away of the intention of asynchronous communication then

you're getting it you should reply and actually take priority over your schedule which is what

your calendar is for and to me that's my strategy and i'll get to the technology later on i have

this this beautiful quote i don't know who it's by but it's brilliant and that is schedule your

priorities don't prioritize your schedule and having my calendar open separately from my email

means that i plan my day and i look at my calendar and i look at my calendar and i look at my calendar

and i look at my schedule and then i look at the messages that come in that might have an impact on

that schedule when i want to not the other way around because otherwise you will be and this is

my next bane and that's topic for another show the instant messaging part jesus christ if email was

bad corporate messaging is even worse um because we weren't distracted enough uh now we need to

rely to corporate messages and keep those channels open and at some point yes it's faster and it's

it's more efficient but timing wise same thing uh but yeah to me the strategy of email is um

i try to take moments when i i do my email mostly in the mornings and in the evenings or in the

middle if i'm working on a project which at which emails are going to come in and i meticulously

filter out shit that i don't need like i don't know i get a newsletter or a message about i don't

know some service that i'm using that's like unsubscribed or i put a rule in that i'll

immediately archives it um as for storing emails do you delete emails almost never yeah that's

that's so yeah that's but again we sort of talked about why what i do however

is archive they use the archive button for everything and so you know what i said earlier

i have 700 emails in my inbox that's because i've been archiving bits and pieces as i go and

eventually it gets to the point where that number is getting too big and i don't want to see that

number anymore and i will go into my inbox and i will select everything over 30 days old that's in

my inbox archive it gone archived gone don't look at it i don't it's

there if somebody says hey did you get that thing i sent you last month i'll search box and i go

from john oh look there's that message next um i mean he sent it to me five weeks ago yeah and

didn't follow up with me until today so it wasn't that important there you go i have the same

approach um then i i i'll teach you a dutch word um which you might want to translate uh do you

use i'll use a dutch word that i used with my clients for a long time

when i was a system uh system engineer uh do you use mopicus

which you have to spell that for me mopicus is uh m-a-p-e-k-i-s m-a-p-p-e-k-e-s i was close

uh oh it didn't detect the language it's it's a flemish it's a flemish uh slang term

folders do you use folders

uh no um so i'm in gmail so no because you don't really do folders in gmail yeah um i do

use tags in a limited way yeah so i use tags for groups of things that i know i'm going to need to

find in a specific circumstance okay that i understand one example being

if i get any email that is tax related yeah okay yeah it gets two tags it gets texas and texas 2024

and then when i do my taxes i remove the texas 2024 tag from it

and it just but i once once those tags are applied it's archived i have seen people

make it their life's work

to synchronize to file and catalog yes all the emails that they got into their little folders

i've small i talked to small business owners and i said to them said who empties the mailbox

my intern does that okay what does he do well he throws out the spam and he gives me what's

important i said like that's great so you have basically the role where you're taking out not

only the mailbox but also the in

they they would manage the info at mailbox as a as a business owner i said that that's the

spammiest place that you can work at and you with you have the highest salary of everybody

your time's the most valuable and you are spending time cataloging all that so everybody

can distract you and everybody gets the time of day that their email will be looked at and will

be handled and you're doing that on the info mailbox if it's on your personal mailbox

okay and then i said the second thing that i would say is like imagine printing every email

and putting it in the folder cabinets behind you and they would learn that that would be insanity

i said good because that's what you're doing digitally yeah but letting it i said you have

this thing that isn't that is capable of finding everything finding what you need if you only know

what you need and you're not able to find everything you need and you're not able to

search for and you don't have to remember it what is it it's called a computer you're using it right

now but a lot of people didn't want to let go they went like no i will never find that email again if

i don't put it in folder 2024 may john and correspondence and i have to drag it in there

i'll never find it again yep exactly and it's you know it's it goes to being able to trust your

tools yep right to a point so for me

those are no for email i i'm on gmail i'm on gmail personally i'm on gmail at work right and

it's research is good search is real good yeah works real well yeah right if if i say if i know

there's things i'm going to need to find as a group they get a tag yeah like i say tax receipts

the other things i the other ones i tag are newsletters that i have specifically chosen

yeah not not oh i'm gonna send you my

emotional newsletter because you visited my website and had to give me your email address

for some reason okay but i have six newsletters so that i have marked as subscriptions and they

get their own tag so if i want to read amber macarthur's newsletter i can click on my amber

mac tag and go and read her newsletter i want to read the astronomy cast email blast that they

send out once a month for the astronomy cast podcast i can click on that one and i can look

at those ones specifically because i all want to read the astronomy cast email blasts that they

almost never want to read them when they arrive yeah that's a that's almost never but i also don't

want them sitting in my inbox so that kind of those ones yeah they arrive they get tagged and

they get archived i don't see them a rule does it for me it's just i i look down on my my astronomy

cast tag and it's got a one beside it it's like oh i haven't read the latest astronomy cast but

they're off your radar they're off your inbox radar they're off they're out of my brain i don't

want to go down gtd because that's where my brain is going to go and i'm not going to read them

because that's the the there are there is a valuable lesson in gtd that my that i'm not going

to get into the details of it today but we probably should do a show on it um on to-do lists i'll book

two hours in my calendar yeah not no but in terms of intentionality there is there is one very good

lesson from gtd that i think we could probably shoehorn into one of these episodes okay um but

for me that act of getting into the details of it and getting into the details of it and getting

it out of my inbox gets it off my mind gets it out of my short-term brain radar and i've i have

an email in my inbox right now that's still in my inbox that i've not actioned and it'll land it in

2020 august of 2020 and it haunts me that i haven't dealt with it yet it's okay it's still

it's been like three years so four years yeah it's it's a project

i would like to do it's the confirmation email from the the project website that is an ongoing

project that's been going for 15 years they you know they're still ongoing i can join it anytime

i want um but yeah every time i look at it i'm like oh um i really should do something or i need

to stop kidding myself and i'm never going to do it uh actionable email on the bottom of my list

what to do with

the the paperwork that needs to be uh formalized when i croak when me and my wife croak at the same

time what happens to we don't have kids so what happens to everything we have my mine is much

higher up my list because it only arrived like two weeks ago okay no it's the fall it's my i

need to do a follow-up about it yeah okay literally from two weeks ago so um you already

talked about what email service that you use you're a gmail guy um yep um i'm a i'm in the middle

um for personal mail gmail historically for work outlook uh so office 365 two different approaches

to email uh that i see um whereas i see gmail as a bucket and office 365 or outlook.com

as a classic iteration of of the uh the email client the funny thing is google calendar is a

separate thing it is integrated but you can you can do it differently so my yeah and i was on outlook

at work until about three or four years ago so i've i know that world well and yeah i sure hope

the search is going to be good and i'm going to be able to do it and i'm going to be able to do it

better and faster than it used to be search in uh in outlook online is good yeah searching good

in the outlook clients is still like what the hell horrifyingly bad why does it take you i know

that email is like right there somewhere very close why is it taking you three minutes to find

it are you checking pst files somewhere in nigeria or something what the hell is right there dude

the the outlook clients is the bane of my existence i hate it with a passion although it takes one of

the boxes that i want from that my that's my intention from technology is that it is not real

time the outlook client can be used offline which is amazing look in gmail yeah true true the gmail

tab can be used offline but you're right yeah but you're right yeah yeah it does the other thing it

helps your intentionality is because we don't like email it makes that thing we don't like

harder and that's a good thing yes but so no client for you no um we're not allowed at work

and quite frankly there's not that many gmail clients that are any good

um for my humble opinion for my personal use i have apple mail

so i can check my gmail mailbox as something comes in but i only open it up from time to time

because i don't like the gmail interface really i think it's a bucket it's fine yeah it's it's a

bucket i've had a just a just a wee byline a very interesting discussion with some of my uh partners

uh that i work with business-wise they have their mx record set to their hosting there they have a

couple of mailboxes they enable imap on these mailboxes and then they take free gmail accounts

have them pull these email boxes into gmail and reply as the address that that she that that

mailbox has and the theory that they went yeah keith is so okay let me just run you through there

so you have your diagram for this no no no easy so mx record is set to domain x.com

okay on domain x.com on my hosting service ina i i build a mailbox nightwise at domain x.com

sure okay so nightwise at katie murray.net don't email that just don't um pretend email account

all right so katie murray.net with with mx record set up on it um nightwise at katie murray.net

and you can can that's a

just a front end then or it's an imap box it's an imap box it's an imap box so you'll basically

the mail comes in and it sits in that box i enable imap on that box then i take your isp or whatever

via my isp right but instead of approaching it with the clients i approach it with gmail i let

gmail imap that mailbox into my gmail box so pulling all the mailbox is on a different domain

it's a hupsie flupsie at gmail.com okay right so it's a free gmail box so it pulls in all the

emails in the gmail box and it has the authority to send her nightwise at katie murray.net

right and that's how they use it and the the you're basically bypassing the fact that

you don't have a paid gmail service yeah i can't

being able to use gmail but actually send and receive through your isp's email account two

two reasons one yeah yeah decreased costs um and two they said we use gmail as a client

and to me that was like i sat there and i went like that's either the most cheap

um redneck solution i've ever seen and if you do that you're going to be able to use gmail

in a corporate setting you should be ashamed of yourself and on the other end i think that is

probably one of the most brilliant things i've ever seen and it was really they used the gmail

web interface as a client to pull in different imap boxes and sort accordingly which which was a

very weird approach but it works

was it one-to-one then at that point like they had a uh generic whatever at gmail.com

per imap box yes so they were one-to-one so anytime you sent from that generic

it went out via the imap it went out via the imap because gmail can use another smtp server to send

out yeah crazy wow and the mx and then the whole mail tree it works fantastic

so it's not sent out via the mx of via the smtp of gmail it is yeah sent out by the smtp of the

domain right which it feels it feels weird i mean i appreciate the ingenuity it also feels

over engineered yes because you now have two single points of failure if gmail goes down

you're screwed if the imap goes down you're screwed yeah

but they both have to work all the time for you to send an email when gmail goes down you just

you just connect the client to your imap box sure but if you got time to wire all that up and

assuming you remember the password still because you set this up four years ago i thought it was

incredibly complex just to save a couple of bucks on on yes paid gmail account yes but you know i

also browse the r slash self-hosted reddit so i i get people who spend don't want to spend any money

just to be able to wire it them

against the rules of it has to be it has to be simple high digital torque remember that with

that that's high digital traction low i didn't say we should use it here i'm not saying it follows

our rules i'm just saying i understand from an amateur side kind of point yeah sure go ahead

play with it from the business i mean i run linux i run linux on my main machine nightwise i

understand project as uh main driver yeah i get it man as it's there's been a lot of good

but uh there's been a lot of questionable things that have happened on this machine since i've

moved it over anyways that's neither here nor there so when we talk about email you say like

i use gmail i use the web interface that's why we're here that's why we're here so for me on

the business side that is where i'm starting to get annoyed because um i have to use the web

interface of outlook.com because i have shared mailboxes uh that i use functional mailboxes

which if you do this in gmail it's a total shit show a topic for another show but if you have a

shared mailbox that you want to be able to yeah to uh you know like like uh i don't know uh

um podcast at nightwise.com let's say you know that's a shared inbox um if you set that up in

office 365 it's fine you can see it in the web interface of your uh outlook.com you can access

it there that's great do the same thing in gmail the mails that get

sent to the shared inbox just come into your inbox in your regular inbox and they get a little tag

and that's it so that's not logical to me but an an outlook.com in office 365

when i want to use a client the only client i can use is outlook because apple mail does not support

the shared opening up the shared inboxes neither does thunderbird in a functional

matter so i am stuck with office 365 outlook.com online that integrates mail and calendar which i'm

which is to me not the intention of email i i want those two separate um and and that's why

i'm looking at gmail but then gmail has a a terrible time of splitting personal community

or individual communication with generic mailboxes so yeah

but for me also um uh no clients if i don't have to and final question of course is uh is

notifications email personal yes work never it's the very first thing i disable when uh i i set up

mail uh and i don't have to disable them because they're not on by default with uh

web-based gmail client but uh yeah it used to be the very first thing i did when i set up mail

i don't have to disable them because they're not on by default with uh web-based gmail client but

turn off on a new machine outlook is installed right click disable notification disable the

sound disable the little envelope in the corner i don't want to know um the don't tell me number

of unread emails on my phone yes uh ding dongs no yes yeah so just i see that something's come in

but yeah but if it's urgent it shouldn't be an email that's the the age-old uh the age-old quest

so we've been we've been going through a lot of things and we've been doing a lot of things

wrong for for for uh almost an hour here uh so we've talked about which technology that we use

and how do we approach it uh my final question to you is what's the future of email how do you see

my future of email or the future of email both oh um email is at a at a sort of wider global

larger scale email is a legacy technology

that is not going to die anytime soon uh slack thought they were going to kill email

right replace email come join the wonderful world of slack it's so much better that was their whole

spiel right it's better than email you won't have to deal with email again i'm dealing with nearly

as much email and that many slack messages over again yep so that didn't work um yeah i mean i

don't see it i don't see it going away

i think the continued drive towards better email hygiene for people um as we as we as more people

start to use it more intentionally because i think it does become overwhelming um and you sort of have

to learn how to manage it as a as a skill um i think that's that it it starts to occupy that

place of where as i say earlier i think it's on the trajectory of phone calls we're on

right we used to get you know you used to walk into an office in the early 2000s late 90s

and it's just phones ringing off the hook right there would be phones physical phones yeah there

were physical phones on the desk and they would ring through the day as you did work yeah um even

even in my professional career that progressed from getting phone calls every single day and

one of the things we had to do as a as a software developer

team that was supporting applications is we needed a support phone number tied to a physical phone

in the office that somebody had to have on their desk to it's all email or it's Slack or it's

whatever these days, right? Phone, those phones are gone. And I think, you know, I still have a

phone. I don't have a home phone, but I do have a cell phone and I do use it to make the odd phone

call. I still use email. I don't see that going away. I don't use it as much as I used to. I have

other things for other reasons right now. Everything has to go through email. So I, for me

personally, I think that trajectory continues outside of my work life. I don't think it's going

to drop much lower than it is right now. It's not, there's not that many emails going through there

as it is. So.

Uh, I don't see that, that number coming down proportionately in the next 10 years as it has

over the last 10 years, but yeah, I don't think it's going up.

I have a romantic view of email. Um, I see disturbing the future of email to me is full

circle back to Downton Abbey where getting an email is, is something important where

somebody takes the time to talk to you and send you an email.

Send you a longer message where the quest for substance on a personal level can come back to

email where we don't send a thumbs. So, uh, I am, I'm memory married to, to, to the most,

to the greatest gal in, in, in, in the, on the planet. Um, and I sometimes via messages

send her a little bit of a quote on how, how, how, how amazing I think that she is. So I go this

little bit of a quote. And she says, I don't, I don't think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

little romantic road. And I send her this long romantic message. And then the reply that I get

is basically a thumbs up emoji, which to me is the disturbing response of everything has to be

shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. So I like to have messages that have some substance. So if you

want to take the time to talk to people, you send them a longer email. So to me personally, email

becomes this romantic pan pal thing. But that's very naive. I know. It's very naive. But on a

corporate level, I also see the future of email, because it fights the immediate distractions of

chat. Because if we're going to go along the chat and teams and God knows what way,

we will never get anything done.

And I've...

I've already seen this pushback in bigger companies that say, you know what, I've disabled this chat

thing. If you really want to send me something that's important, put it in an email. And

otherwise, just come by my office and I'll decide when I talk to you. So in the corporate setting,

I see the value of email on the side of being focused and fighting disruptions.

With the big yellow post-it note on it that says, if we are going to go this way,

we really need to talk about email hygiene. And when do you send an email?

You know, that's something that's also important. So the asynchronous side of email and the formal

side of email, which to me are still the intention...

I use email full, still hold their value. So I don't think it's going to go the...

I see Slack going the way of the newsgroups sooner than I see email.

Yeah. Potentially. Yep. I see a lot of parallels there, though, with the way I needed to manage

email is the way I'm needing to manage Slack, right? And where it becomes useful is where it

is managed.

Yes.

Right. So this isn't the Slack podcast, but with all the channels I'm in, I've got

a bunch that I will check. When there's unread messages in these channels,

I will make sure I look at them. When there's unread messages in the rest of these channels,

unless it's an app message and it pings me, I right click on the group marked as read.

So taking on that approach, if we were to filter the incoming emails that we

get via these channel-like philosophy, email would also be manageable. So that's a strategy

right there using...

That is the strategy I employ for the most part.

There you go.

So I've got one of the Gmail functions that I do use that I don't think I touched on earlier was...

The multiple inbox.

Yeah.

So you can, there's multiple inbox, there's multiple, I can't remember the name of it.

Essentially, I have three panes in my Gmail window.

Yeah.

One is the sidebar.

Yeah.

One is my inbox.

Yeah.

Then my third pane is split in three pieces.

Yeah.

One of them is messages tagged with followup.

Yeah.

messages tagged with waiting for a response from somebody and one of them is messages tagged with

you need to read this so coming back to that strategy before we close up because this is a

little little nugget of information that we we could uh that this is suddenly it becomes a

technological approach is that uh the last place you look at your email is your inbox you take your

inbox and you put your own intentions your own filters your own categories onto there let it

rip out the contents of your inbox into separate buckets according to what you think is important

and you only check the buckets as yes and no um some of those tags are applied automatically some

of them aren't yeah right the the the follow-up ones are almost all manually tagged okay right

it's an email that's come in i've looked

at and i said i haven't i have something i need to do to this okay and it's going to take me longer

than a couple of minutes to do okay so right click tag it done it disappears out of my inbox

it's moved to the tag and it flips over to the other that other window and it's there

and i try and keep that as short as i can the idea ideally that follow-up list hopefully is

cleared out at the end of the day okay but right when they're longer term projects so either it's

manually tagged or it's not it's either it's manually tagged or it's not it's either it's

tagged or it's automatically tagged or it's not tagged that determines yeah and that's how i feel

comfortable when i do those big dump to archive yeah it's because the stuff that's already tagged

is already in the archive it's archived and tagged but because it's tagged it shows up on that view

okay so it's not in the inbox anymore it's in that view only okay and then so then when i'm

when i'm cleaning out the inbox it's

everything else in there is just generic whatever's left so your inbox is actually

the residue of your communications not the main the main bucket that you check

i i mean the inbox is an inbox it is the box at which things landed in my email life but they

still have to be sorted out by carson who brings the separate letters to the different uh rooms

and the different

actions that need to be taken and in a lot of ways i am carson right it's some of it is me and

some of it is is gmail doing it for me yeah but the inbox is not hopefully where i'm actioning

things from and that's not where i'm keeping things so rounding out it's like you say it's

a residue right it's it's left over after whatever general actions i have taken right

automatic or manual sorting has taken place the inbox is what's left so rounding up we go we go to

it we come to a beautiful crescendo where you basically say email is the inbox of your

communications that should be filtered through your intentions as what to do with said email

and the residue is either not important can be archived right away but is the inbox is the last

place you act upon

okay now there is an interesting take on email this was a far more interesting show that i

thought it was going to be it's it's a topic we deal every day with it's not the most exciting

thing and yet still it eats out quite a few it eats away quite a few hours of our our day every

day and it is the great bane of everybody is everybody's existence so topic well picked uh

katie and uh that's what we're going to talk about in a little bit but i'm going to talk about

we have about an hour that we've been yapping away and that hopefully we have given you a lot

of inspiration on what to do with email you can still email us we have a new an e a new email

inbox podcast at nightwise.com which is a generic email box that i'm trying in gmail so let me know

if it works and uh it will get auto tagged with the flag podcast feedback so um i'm going to go

to be very uh it's going to be very interesting whether or not uh that's that's going to work

so keith thank you very much for your time and your input and the work that you will do to cut

out the bloopers of this show which is uh marginally less than last time but you'll only

have to cut it once uh and we will see each other on the flip side so uh a lot of emails to check

no no more no more all items have been read all things have been

said it's time to get out of here and leave you and go to bed and go to bed or start my day

whatever it is we uh loved to have you here thank you very much uh listeners thank you keith and

until next time let technology work for you instead of the other way around see you guys bye

you

Thank you.