Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

I’m not going to repeat the ancient incantation of “Don’t use email alerts“. Not a week goes by when someone mentions it within the blogsphere, but I’ve always found that while you can turn off email alerts, it’s more difficult to ignore the follow up phone calls just to check “Have you got my email yet?“.

One way to try and reduce this pressure is to set up your email program to automatically reply with a standard email which informs the sender that you have received the email, and will process it within an allocated period of time. It’s useful to make it clear in the message that it is an automated response, so people don’t assume that you are aware of the mail contents.

It’s not fool proof by any means, but at times where you just want to get down
to some work, but keep getting interrupted it can make it easier on people contacting you who are stuck in reactive models of working who might feel that no reply within 10 minutes is shocking.

Over at http://rickyspears.com/blog/?p=134 Ricky’s gone to a lot of effort to search out the past articles of David Allen from various places on the internet and provide a handy list of them all for quick click access.

I haven’t had much chance to read them yet (There is a lot of them) but they all look to extend around his “Getting Things Done” themes, and while I haven’t seen anything that I’d count as “new” in them, it’s always good to go over old ground from new view points and that’s what this does. And I’m sure some more reading will turn up some lost gems of insight along the way.