One of my SaneBox engineers (no names to protect the guilty) just sent me this quote:

Every Program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Those programs that cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can.

— Third Law of Software Envelopment

Hmmm… I’m thinking this is a little push back on the latest round of production tickets.  

Maybe it’s time to do some self-reflection?

Has my professional transition gone astray?

For many years, I was the CTO/Founder where I saw my job as being the balanced voice of reason in emotional conversations about new product features.  My current position is President/Founder/CTO/customer service exec/chief bottle washer/chief evangelist.  What would old-me think of new-me?

For those in-the-know, this is all about added functionality to http://sanebox.com new email digest that gets delivered directly to your INBOX and allows you to live in your immaculately clean INBOX and continue to efficiently stay on top of all your email.  No other SaneBox feature has elicited such an emotional upsurge in “love letters” from users and requests for enhancements.

Anybody want to side with old-me?  I think that guy was a kill-joy.  I’m thinking of going into flickr and drawing virtual mustaches on all his pictures.

This chart shows where I am in relationship to the current world of SaneBox.  The yellow line is the total emails received by each user this week.  The green line is the total important emails received by each user this week. I am about 65% of the way up the base of the true power user email cliff. 

We will add to this chart in the future but for now it is meant to put your pain in perspective. So before I whine about how much email I get, I will consider the user at the peak who gets an average of 259 emails a day. They must be pretty happy to use SaneBox: 136 of those emails each day just aren’t that important and get automatically filed from their INBOX to their SaneLater folder. And they get a digest each day of the 136 so they can quickly and easily see if they want to override us and promote some of them to their INBOX after all.

I have an old friend who has always had trouble keeping up with his email.  Let’s call him FooBar. FooBar get’s a **lot** of email. And it was his email woes, in addition to that of other friends, that caused me to create http://sanebox.com.  

No I’m not going to mention FooBar by name.  He is a good guy with this one little foible: he thinks every single email might be crucial to his life.

To understand this story you have to know that SaneBox makes decisions about what is “important” email and what is “unimportant” email.  This is a GTD type decision based on what needs your attention right now versus what can wait.  And SaneBox has layers of importance so we distinguish things that can wait a little with things that can wait a longer while.

SaneBox moves the “unimportant” emails automatically out of your INBOX to your SaneLater folder.

FooBar can’t admit that focusing and keeping up with the important stuff is worth letting one email wait a couple of hours.  And this is The Problem.

SaneBox users are supposed to scan their “unimportant” email at least once a day to make sure that a timely issue hasn’t slipped in there.  We can send a digest to your INBOX once or several times a day to make that triage easier. But, you still have to admit to yourself that it is OK if something out-of-the-blue from someone-you-have-no-real-connection-to comes in and waits a few hours until you have time to notice it.

I find that the everything-is-important people are often the leave-email-in-their-INBOX people. They use the read flag to indicate that they already triaged that particular email. THIS IS CRAZY and will lead to email INSANITY. Touch your email as few times as possible.  If you’ve opened it and you can deal with it, deal with it (read,forward,reply and then defer,delete,archive,file).  GET IT OUT OF YOUR INBOX!  

There is the occasional email that will take more time than you have now. SaneBox has defer folders for this. You put the email in one of our defer folders and it disappears from your INBOX until the time you have specified.  Whenever you read an email and leave it in your INBOX it forces you to scroll passed it every single time you look in your INBOX.  And let’s be honest you look there A LOT.

So, this is a public plee to my email challenged friends and all those out there that are everything-is-important people (especially FooBar). Please acknowledge that you are only human and some things deserve your attention right now and some things don’t.  Go sign up for http://SaneBox.com.

As some of you know, my professional life has become all about email.  This means that I often get asked what I believe are the best practices for avoiding email overload.

Here are some general rules that I use. (If you have good ones that I don’t have listed here, please comment and I will update this entry):

1. touch each email only once.  reply/file or read/file or forward/file. If you don’t intend to deal with the email try to avoid opening it. You will multiply your email processing time if you are finding, opening, reading,… finding, opening reading…
2. create a bookmark to send email.  don’t open your inbox to send an email, it just wastes time and energy.
3. send as little email as possible.  only reply when absolutely required.  every email you send causes others to send email back.  this is not a virtual cycle.
4. remember that you only have 18 working hours in a day (hopefully less). we all have more to do each day than we can accomplish.  Acknowledging this is the key to redemption.  Acknowledging this allows you to move on and do the stuff that has to get done now.

SaneBox, my new business, separates your email into importance groups: SaneTop (very important - ASAP), SaneBox (important - do soon), SaneLater, SaneBulk (stuff for reference).  Often I get asked what is the best way to use these new folders and here are some SaneBox empowered rules that I use:

1. create a bookmark for SaneBox.  Use this to process your mail (remember general rule #1).  Personally, I have made my Inbox into a SaneBox (an optional mode where my SaneLater and SaneBulk mail skips my Inbox) so I only need to bookmark my google Inbox.
2. stay out of your actual google Inbox.  every time you look at that mess, it is going to destroy your productivity.  Just the act of mentally scanning it, wastes time and energy. Unless your inbox is a SaneBox :-)
3. create a bookmark for SaneTop.  there are a lot of times that you have 5 minutes and that folder has your crucial envelopes.