One of the biggest drains on my time is emails. My inbox gets emails from:
- Servers telling me how they feel,
- The server that is stressed out,
- The server that got kicked in the butt (restarting them),
- my six bosses,
- ticketing system,
- project management system,
- clients needing help or advice,
- co-workers working on a project,
- vendors providing information to keep my skills alive,
- people selling me stuff,
- or blind sales introductions.
On a given day off, I get about 100-200 emails in my inbox, and I don’t even look at the spam bucket unless I am missing something. The issue is twofold—first, my role, second, my years of service in government. Let’s do the math here so you can understand my point. Assuming 200 emails, if each email takes on average 30 seconds of time to process (guessing low, I think), that is about 1 2/3 hours of my day wasted. How do I manage this?
What gets read? In this order:
- Emails from a server. That is nearly always actionable and requires attention.
- Emails from the various bosses
- Emails from co-workers
- Emails from client
The next group is the various systems like ticketing and project management alters. Again, I am looking for action items that are directly related to my role as DBA and self-appointed CDO (meaning anything related to data and quality of data). The rest that does not require action is deleted.
This leaves the vendor emails. I reduce the noise and ignore the non-critical email. Therefore, spam mail is out. Vendor and vendor want-a-be’s emails (semi-solicited, unsolicited) are mostly ignored. Meaning that if the title meets a present need/interest, I read it. Otherwise, trash!
On my personal cellphone, I have an away message that is something like the following:
“Hello, I am not available, choose wisely leave a message and I might call you back, don’t leave a message and I will permanently block this number”.
This is harsh, and it has eliminated a lot of the noise. I have thought about setting up something like this on my email accounts. Using auto-reply stating:
Thank your for taking the time to send me an email just to be clear I respond to emails in the following order:
- Server notifications
- Co-workers (email from this domain)
- Emails from the ticketing and project management tools
- Clients that are not on this domain
- Current known vendors that I have active projects with and tasks pending with.
If your email is unsolicited, semi unsolicited (subscribed to new letters), solicited (but without meaningful action needed on my part). I will not respond, unless I have a business requirement. This is not an invite to call. I am responding this way to allow you and I to stay focused on the business at hand without wasting either of our time.
Thank you for understanding.
This is the email protocol I use. I want all our jobs to be a lot easier. How can I help you work more effetely?
