A New Methodology for Managing Email

CEO of LinkedIn Jeff Weiner follows four clear cut rules when it comes to managing email mayhem. 

The first is rule is to ramp up a routine. If email won't structure itself (and no, it never never never will) then structure your own email routine. Weiner's routine looks like this:

Wake between 5am and 5:30am; spend roughly an hour on my inbox; catch up on the day's news; have breakfast and play with the kids; workout; go to the office; carve out roughly two hours for buffers each workday; come home; put the girls to bed; have dinner with my wife; and then decompress, typically while watching tv (sporadically cleaning up my inbox via mobile during commercials and the boring parts of whatever we're watching.)

Since technology erodes structure, we need to create rituals to create structure--and productivity--in our days.

The second rule is to write with extreme clarity. "Vague emails beget clarifying follow-ups, further crowding your inbox." Put another way, the best shortcut is to not take one the first time around.  

The third rule is to pay attention to the To: and the CC: fields. The former is inteded for whoever needs to respond. The latter is for context.

The fourth rule, according to Weiner, is to use "email to communicate highly nuanced, sensitive subjects that are bound to generate controversy if not a flat out aggressive response."

This echoes the advice old-school adman David Ogilvy gave regarding preventing communication stagnation in his self-same office:

Crusade against paper warfare. Encourage your people to air their disagreements face-to-face.

My only addition to Weiner's four rules: don't strive for the zero unread inbox. For many of us, its an unrealistic possibility. Striving for the zero unread inbox can often interfere with Weiner's first rule - creating rituals - if it means breaking dinner time to clean up your inbox. The value added from a pleasant meal (and thirty minutes without looking at a screen) is much more rejuvenating than the value added from a 13 unread count down from 14.

Nicholas Kristof's Help Thy Neighbor

California devotes $179,400 to keep a juvenile in detention for a year, and spends less than $10,000 per student in its schools.

This statistic lands smack dab in the middle of Nicholas Kristof's latest Sunday column. He elaborates on yet another story of "justice run amok" by sharing the tale of Edward Young, a 43 year old man once convicted of several burglaries as a younger adult. Since his days of pilferage, Young has married, raised four children, and taken a job working six days a week. 

Kristof describes the tragedy:  

Then a neighbor died, and his widow, Neva Mumpower, asked Young to help sell her husband’s belongings. He later found, mixed in among them, seven shotgun shells, and he put them aside so that his children wouldn’t find them.

“He was trying to help me out,” Mumpower told me. “My husband was a pack rat, and I was trying to clear things out.”

Then Young became a suspect in burglaries at storage facilities and vehicles in the area, and the police searched his home and found the forgotten shotgun shells as well as some stolen goods. The United States attorney in Chattanooga prosecuted Young under a federal law that bars ex-felons from possessing guns or ammunition. In this case, under the Armed Career Criminal Act, that meant a 15-year minimum sentence.

...We also have a serious problem with the irresponsibility of mass incarceration. When almost 1 percent of Americans are imprisoned (and a far higher percentage of men of color in low-income neighborhoods), our criminal justice system becomes a cause of family breakdown and contributes to the delinquency of a generation of children. And mass incarceration interacts with other government policies, such as the way the drug war is implemented, to have a disproportionate effect on African-Americans. Black men use marijuana at roughly the same rate as white men but are more than three times as likely to be arrested over it.

Interesting note to ask ourselves what exactly we are paying for with that $179,400 price tag.