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The article is full of sad cases of people who think that declaring email bankruptcy will solve their problem. It won’t. I’ve talked about why email bankruptcy is worse in some ways than financial bankruptcy, and this shows why email bankruptcy is not a solution.

Just as people without financial skills may find themselves bankrupt, people who lack email and time-management skills will find themselves wanting to declare email bankruptcy. People are usually restricted from starting businesses immediately after a financial bankruptcy. In a similar manner, people who suffer from extreme email overload should ensure they get some training in how to handle their workload before they get back in the game.

It’s not just a skill these people are lacking, though. It’s a way of viewing their inboxes and the place the inbox occupies in their life. I’m always saying that email overload is a state-of-mind, and David Ferris puts this very nicely:

“A lot of people like the feeling that they have everything done at the end of the day. They can’t have it anymore.”

I speak from experience. I once declared “job bankruptcy” — my inability to cope with my workload, in which email played a major part, prompted me to tender my resignation. My boss did not want to accept it, but I was determined. During the time that I worked out my notice, I adopted the Getting Things Done method. All of a sudden, I had more than doubled my productivity and reduced my stress tremendously. GTD worked for me because it solved both the practical and psychological sides of the problem. I found that I could do the job well after all, and I continued working there for another 18 months!

Imagine that you have asked David to review a report, and that he has responded by committing to a self-imposed deadline:

“I’m extremely busy right now, but I’ll have time to review your report on Monday.”

Where do you think your request will be at the beginning of next week? Like many managers, David suffers from chronic email overload, so by Monday it will probably be buried under a few hundred emails in his overflowing inbox. There’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that he’ll see it and be reminded that he committed to send his feedback.

You will therefore need to remind David of his commitment. But if you become too much of a nuisance, David might not deliver. So, how do you remind him in a nice way, without becoming too much of a nag?

All you need to do is say, “Thanks!”

However, it’s not what you say, it’s when you say it. Don’t reply to David’s message until the time arrives when he promised to work on it.

On Monday, your reply will arrive in David’s inbox, and will subtly remind him of his commitment at exactly the time that he planned to work on it:

“Thanks, David. today will be just in time to fix the document up before the final draft is due. I await your comments eagerly.”

I have used this tactic on many occasions, and have found it very successful. Sometimes you need to help those around you to be a little more productive!

I received only 55 messages from 37 sources that can be described as newsletters, and it took a total of only 72 minutes to read them, including any associated links I was tempted to click on.

Six of these contained at least one piece of information that helps me do my job better, and thirteen messages (from nine sources) managed to pique my interest on subjects that have little bearing on my job.

According to this, approximately 34% of the messages contained something useful or interesting. Does that mean I’m wasting 66% of my time reading useless newsletters just on the off-chance that I’ll find something valuable? Apparently not: 62 out of the total 72 minutes (86%) were spent reading messages from sources that gave useful or interesting information. So I wasted only 10 minutes on useless newsletters. 

This is rather surprising, as I had assumed that I would be able to save a significant amount of time by unsubscribing from the less valuable newsletters. I’m still going to unsubscribe from some of the newsletters, as it will considerably reduce unnecessary inbox clutter.

I’m going to continue measuring for another few weeks, as I need more data points from the newsletters that I receive only once a week. I’m hoping to develop some rules of thumb to help decide what to keep and what to cut.

In order to help me reduce the amount of rubbish in my inbox and to reduce the time I waste on reading messages “just in case”, I’ve decided to record various statistics about the newsletters I’m subscribed to. I’m then going to analyze the results and see if I can devise a more effective newsletter subscription policy.

I don’t quite know what to measure — this is what I’ll be tracking to start with:

• How long does each newsletter take to read? If I am tempted to click on any links, I’m going to include the time taken to read those web pages too.
• Does it help me get my work done or do it better? If not, does it at least provide information that will probably help in the near future?
• Is it interesting? Is there at least one tidbit of interesting information in it? If I click on a link — it’s a fair sign that it caught my interest.

I’m going to keep this up for a week, and report back here with my findings.

By default, Outlook divides its main window into three sections: navigation pane, message list and the preview area. If you don’t have a wide screen, the preview area is squashed up against the right hand side, and is not really comfortable to use for reading messages — just for scanning them to see if they need to be opened in a separate window for more attention.

This frustrates me, as I like to use the main window for actually reading my messages. I’ve tried widening the preview area at the expense of narrowing the message list, but if the message list is too narrow, it will take up 2 lines for each message, i.e. show only half the number of messages as before — not good, since I also like to see as much of my inbox as possible in a single glance.

There’s another obvious solution that’s been staring me in the face, and it took one of my SpeedFiler customers to point it out to me — just get rid of the navigation pane! All it takes is an Alt-F1 to make it disappear and another Alt-F1 to bring it back when you need it. When the navigation pane disappears, it donates its space to the preview area, which suddenly becomes wide enough to display the messages in a readable manner.

In fact a lot of the time I manage quite well without a navigation pane at all. Whenever I need to go to another folder, I hit Ctrl+Y to bring up SpeedFiler’s streamlined navigation window and choose my destination. If you don’t have SpeedFiler, Ctrl+Y will bring up Outlook’s own Go to Folder window, which shows exactly the same folders that appear in the navigation area that we just hid.

In addition, if you want to get quickly back to the Inbox from another folder, all it takes is a quick Ctrl+Shift+I.

I don’t believe he’ll take the drastic step of deleting all his mail and notifying all of his contacts that he’s starting again, because in some ways, email bankruptcy is similar to financial bankruptcy:

• it can have a catastrophic effect on your reputation;
• you need a recovery plan, otherwise you’ll be in trouble again soon.

However, if email bankruptcy would really be like financial bankruptcy, people would stop sending you emails (extending credit), because they would not not trust you to answer them (repay debt). Is that good or bad?

Actually, a closer look at Scoble’s post shows that his problem is not the large volume of email he gets. His inbox is clean, and his messages are all triaged into various folders. His problem seems to be in finding the time to perform all the actions related to the 1537 triaged emails. I would hazard a guess that the root of the problem is that he’s over-committing. Each time we read a message and file it away in an “Action” folder, we are making a commitment to ourselves to handle it at a later date. It’s all too easy to make too many such commitments. It’s nothing to do with email itself — that’s just a communications medium which triggers most of our commitments, and email programs make it too easy for us to pile up these commitments without realizing how overcommitted we are.

My advice to Robert, if indeed this is his problem, is to take his own advice and get back on the GTD wagon. GTD makes us keep a list of projects and a list of next actions. If an incoming email triggers a new project, it is instantly clear to us whether we have room for it now, whether we’ll have to defer it to a later date, or even decline it altogether. Since I adopted GTD, it’s become much easier for me to say “no” when that’s the honest answer, and also much easier to say “yes,” knowing I’ll be able to honor the commitment.

A recent 90-minute meeting with someone from another company took a total of fifteen (15) emails back-and-forth and two phone calls to set up, over the space of a few days.

I won’t bore you with details, which included working with both of my counterpart’s personal assistants, each based in a different country, and reacting to changing travel plans. This was an extreme case, but not by much.

The negotiations in this case were so mechanical, that they could almost have been conducted automatically by computer. It was therefore a relative waste of my time to have to deal with the numerous volleys of messages. My counterpart was insulated from this time- and attention-consuming process by his assistants, who conducted the logistical negotiations on his behalf. However, it’s a great pity if this is what PA’s are really for, especially because having a go-between also adds its own overhead to the process. Now imagine how many more messages would have been required if I had a PA too! It almost defeats the whole purpose.

Microsoft Exchange and similar systems provide a rather rudimentary method of time-slot negotiation; one side may see when the other party is free, and then send them an invitation, which is then accepted, rejected or returned with a suggested alternative time. Even these systems don’t work unless all parties are from the same company.

At first glance, it shouldn’t be too difficult to rig together a system that would allow our computers to negotiate this sort of meeting. An idealized meeting negotiation agent would have to know, or be able to ask you if necessary:

• when you prefer to have your meetings
• where you plan to be on each day (time-zone / country / city)
• where you prefer to have your meetings on each day — are you tied to your office? Can you get away for lunch? Are you able to travel to the other party’s office?

Unfortunately, the above information is rather hard to pin down accurately, and it’s quite volatile. The problem here is not so much a software problem, rather it is how to get software to learn what our preferences are and to use this knowledge to arrive at the same decisions as we humans would make.

I suspect that it will be quite some time before computers can save us time in this way, although this negotiation process can definitely be streamlined significantly with a few rather simple improvements, which would hopefully eliminate a whole class of messages from our inboxes.

If your life depended on it, would you choose email as your preferred method of communications? Too many things can go wrong, at both the sending and receiving ends, and I’m not talking about purely technical glitches.

How easy is it to accidentally delete someone from the list of recipients, or mistype someone’s name or address so that it goes to John Doe instead of John Smith?

Now compare this relative fragility with the potential damage it can cause. It boggles the mind. Here’s an example from earlier this year:

E-mail glitch hides $4B in Air Force deals

New employee made a routing error

The U.S. Air Force said a new employee’s e-mail routing error kept the Pentagon and the public in the dark about nearly $4 billion of its contracts in December.

Lost in space had been more than $1.57 billion awarded to Northrop Grumman Corp., $1.22 billion for The Boeing Co., and almost $509 million for Lockheed Martin Corp., among others.

“It’s awfully embarrassing,” said Air Force spokeswoman Jean Schaefer. The contracts at issue totaled $3.98 billion and covered projects ranging from remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft to F-22A fighter jets, she said.

The Air Force employee inadvertently dropped the Defense Department from the e-mail distribution list for the contracts after moving into the new job on Dec. 1, Schaefer said.

[Computerworld, February 14, 2006]

So how can we mitigate the risks?

If you have an important procedure that must be executed to perfection whenever it is triggered, don’t rely on bare-bones free-form email. If your organization does not already have a system for managing such workflows, you can use a simple document template to prevent trivial errors from causing extensive damage. Create a document to be used as a checklist whenever the procedure needs to be executed.

At execution time, the document will be shuttled between the players, each one performing a pre-defined task towards completing the process.

I’ve found that the most efficient format is to divide the document into sections. Each section contains instructions to a specific person (either explicitly identified by name, or unambiguously referred to by their job title), as well as fields for them to insert any information that is needed for later steps.

Keeping the instructions inside the workflow has the following advantages:

• It refreshes people’s minds about what they need to do, without them having to refer to an external source.

• It provides just-in-time training for new hires about the procedure, i.e. learn by doing.

• It documents execution of the workflow for record-keeping (or CYA) purposes.

The instructions to each participant must state clearly:

1. what the participant is expected to do,

2. how they “pass the buck,”

3. to whom they should pass said buck.

When people are presented with clear instructions to play their part in a self-evidently organized process, it is much easier to get them to cooperate, especially if they can see exactly how the process depends on them. This is true, even if the trigger suddenly lands in their inbox with no prior warning.

(I usually check email every few hours during the day.)

What a great idea! People who correspond with Bob now know that: 

• he does not allow incoming email to disturb what he’s doing (he practices GTD), but
• he’ll definitely read your message within a few hours.

I’m going to adopt this idea with a slight tweak, and add the following to my email signature:

I usually check email every couple of hours during the day, and I reply to most messages within 24 hours.

This won’t stop the odd idiot from calling up to ask if I’ve seen the email he just sent me, but I am confident that it will help to train the rest of my environment to interact with me more efficiently.

A 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London shows that people who allow themselves to be constantly interrupted by email and instant messaging perform slightly worse than those who are stoned on pot.

Researchers asked two sets of subjects to take IQ tests. One group had to check e-mail and respond to instant messages while taking the test. The second group just sat down and did the test without distractions. Surprise, surprise, the distracted group didn’t do as well on the test—10 points worse than the control group. In similar testing conditions, people intoxicated by marijuana had scores 8 points lower.

Discover Magazine [via Tom Mighell]

The above study tested the effects on IQ, but I’m quite sure that both activities impair judgment just as badly. How strange it is that multi-tasking is considered “good” in today’s work environment!

Apart from its effects on our IQ and judgment, multi-tasking can also waste an incredible amount of time. Every time we switch from one task to another, it can take us fifteen minutes to get up to speed on the new task. Each time we interrupt ourselves to check email, we are costing ourselves a fifteen minute delay, even if we only spend two minutes away from the original task.

How to avoid this trap:

• Turn off your email notification chime!
• Define specific times of day during which you check email, and don’t check email at any other time.
• Don’t use your inbox as a task list — this will only suck you into email every time you want to get some “proper” work done. Instead, once you have determined that a message requires work, drag it into a special folder entitled “Action”, or drag it into Outlook’s task list. You can even write it down on a piece of paper. Whichever method you choose, the main thing is to get it out of the inbox.

If you succeed in resisting the urge for constant stimulation, you will be rewarded by being able to complete solid chunks of high quality work, and you will probably benefit from a significantly lower stress level, too.

As I used to be one of these overloaded individuals, I can tell you that they only reply to two types of people: those whose cooperation they need in order to get their own job done, and those who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient.

As I said, I used to be one of these people. I now consistently reply to almost all of my email within 24 hours. So how do I maintain my responsiveness?

In my old way of doing things, if I needed to reply to a message, it was extremely tempting to leave it in the inbox as a reminder to reply. Creating an entry on my task list saying “Reply to such-and-such message” seemed a bit ridiculous to me, so I used to let these messages loiter around in my inbox until I got around to answering them. (Or until they got tired of waiting and disappeared.)

You can guess that my inbox was clogged up with messages that I’d already read. I found that it was easy for such messages to get buried and forgotten, and at best they wasted my time when I re-read and re-re-read them as I scanned my inbox.

I am now disciplined enough to keep my inbox free of clutter, so what do I do with the messages that I need to reply to?

This 2-step solution guarantees that I don’t forget to reply:

1. Need to reply but don’t have time right now? Drag the message into a special folder, entitled “Reply”, that holds all the messages that need replying to.
2. Schedule a couple of times a day, every day, in which to crank though the Reply folder, during which you shoot off the necessary answers and file the messages elsewhere.
   If you don’t have time to formulate a reply to a complex or time-consuming issue, use this method to keep the other side’s faith until you get the chance to reply.

Since I started using this strategy, replying within 24 hours is no longer stressful – it’s just part of my regular routine.

Related Article: How to keep track of overdue replies that other people owe you

Multiple, short emails can sometime create less overload than a single large email, and can be much more efficient. When is this the case? When you're delegating multiple unrelated tasks or asking multiple unrelated questions which require more than a one-sentence answer.

By writing separate emails, you can keep each message short and to the point, which makes it easy for the recipient to read and understand what you want. More importantly, each message gets its own subject line, which you can now optimize to fit the task at hand.

What's better? Compound messages such as these:

Subject: I need you to do a few things

Subject: Need your input

Or focused messages such as these:

Subject: Interview John Smith, shortlisted candidate for Support Manager

Subject: Finalize travel arrangements to next week's conference

Subject: Vista schedule slippage: Delay to 2007 or cut features?

Subject: Away next week: Can I review your draft proposal beforehand?

Many people use their inbox as a to-do list, and file or delete each message as they complete the related work. So if you're delegating tasks, make the subject sound like a task! If you're asking a question, phrase the subject as a question!

If you bury multiple tasks in the same message, you divide the attention given to each one. None of the tasks is clearly visible in the list of messages in the inbox, and the recipient will have to keep your message around and re-read it every time she scans her inbox to discover which tasks she has not yet completed. There's a good chance she'll miss something — you are setting her up for failure.

By using separate messages, you are ensuring that each task gets the attention it deserves.

Remember: this works only for unrelated tasks — people will not take kindly to this if the tasks are closely related.

P.S. This also helps the compulsive filers among us — we can file each message in a separate folder, instead of agonizing over which folder is the best one for the compound message! :-)

“You know, Bob really doesn’t do email well. You really should use the phone to reach him.”

Robert Scoble‘s wife Maryam likes Scott Guthrie, a General Manager at Microsoft, just because:

“He always answers his email.”

Getting such a busy person to respond consistently, reflects just as much on Maryam Scoble’s email writing skills, so I would hazard a guess that Scott thinks highly of her too.

If people’s opinion of you were based solely on your email responsiveness, can you imagine what they would think of you?

This works both ways, as the above examples show. It’s so easy to be responsive, and if you don’t have time to deal with an issue, be honest about it — to yourself and the other party.

Michael Hyatt, President & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, makes the following connection between responsiveness and responsibility (literally: one’s ability to respond):

As I was making my way to the top, my former boss, Sam Moore, used to ask everyone I worked with, “What’s it like to work with Mike?” “How’s he really doing?” “Do you think he could take on more responsibility?” In responding to him, all they had was their experience with me. If I hadn’t been responsive to them, how do you think they would have responded to his questions? “More responsibility? Are you kidding me? He can’t handle what he has now!” It wouldn’t take too many candid responses like that to tank my career.

Yesterday, I sent an email to someone who I don’t know, trying to interest him in my email productivity products and in exchanging ideas. He wrote back to me within a few hours, and his very brief response says a lot:

Hi Itzy — I’m very interested in your product [...] but right now I’m swamped. I may not get around to getting back to you until this weekend.

This fellow is probably busier than most of my overloaded correspondents, but his message says to me:

• Although I’m extremely busy, I am still in control of the situation.

• I have integrity and self-honesty — I don’t fool myself into making commitments I cannot keep.

• I still have time to be cordial and polite, even to people who can’t help me with my current workload.

Was this just a nice way to blow me off? I don’t think so.

Related article: How (not) to provoke a response from someone who gets loads of email

Who still owes me a reply to a message I sent?

Unless you have a system to track the requests you send via email, only when you actually need the information as input to another task, will you remember, for example, that Jim hasn’t reviewed those figures you emailed him last week. At this point, if the response hasn’t arrived, it’s almost too late because you cannot get on with your own work, and your own schedule and commitments are affected.

Here’s a trick for keeping track:

1. In your email program, create a folder called “Waiting For Answer”.
2. Whenever you write a message that requires an answer, have your email program save the message in the “Waiting For Answer” folder after it’s been sent.
3. Check the contents of the “Waiting For Answer” folder a few times a day, and remove the messages that have received a response. If it’s getting close to when you need a reply and it still hasn’t arrived, it’s time to send a reminder…

Step 2 is a bit clumsy in Microsoft Outlook, though it can be done. When you compose your message, click the Options… button on the toolbar, and specify “Waiting For Answer” in the Save sent message to: box. If you want to make life easier, you can use SpeedFiler to prompt you for a folder when you send the message.

The best trick for getting a response, however, is to ask for it! Take the guesswork out of the message and include a very clear call to action that spells out exactly what you are asking the recipient to do, and by when.

The most significant improvement for me is the rule that colors messages blue, if I am the only recipient on the TO: line. Such messages are most likely to be more important that the rest of the stuff that fills up my inbox, because:

• They have not been sent to a bunch of people, but specifically to me.
• They are therefore more likely to relate to my area of responsibility.
• They are also more likely to require action.
• If I don’t answer, nobody else will. (Read some interesting background information about this.)

In Microsoft Outlook, it’s very easy to define such a rule. On the menu in the main Outlook window, just click on Tools | Organize. This will display the following panel above the messages:

You can create additional rules using the Automatic Formatting… link at the top-right of the panel.

A number of SpeedFiler users have quite emotionally told me about the part SpeedFiler has played in helping them get out of this situation. For example:

I just wanted to share with you the fact that I used SpeedFiler over the past three days to shrink my inbox size from 1200 messages to 50. The first 400-500 messages went relatively easily, but the remaining got harder and harder as the number shrank (each successive filtering gets harder). SpeedFiler was absolutely critical in easing the burden. I couldn’t have done it using Outlook’s basic “Move to Folder” interface.

The psychological benefit of shrinking an inbox cannot be underestimated. I now know all issues I need to respond to, including issues from several weeks ago. The noise is gone — I can see the trees.

I now have to unlearn/relearn new skills — handle the messages as they arrive, don’t leave them in the inbox (if possible) to say “I’ll handle it some other time”.

SpeedFiler is not just about filing messages, it is just as much about making it easy to get them out of the way, so that your vision is not clouded by unprocessed “stuff”. It gives you a gentle push by encouraging and prompting you to file your messages, but you still have to deal with the “hard” part: deciding how to handle each message.

While using SpeedFiler on his email mountain, this person also figured out one of the basic principles of GTD: process a message when you first read it. By the time you close the message, you should have decided how it affects you:

• Is it actionable? If so, what’s the next action? (–> do it now OR add to task list/calendar OR delegate it to someone else)
• Do I need to keep this? If so, where does it belong?

These are seemingly easy decisions, but they force us to recognize reality, which is difficult for some of us to face, so we are tempted to let the message remain in the inbox.

If you get into the habit of processing your email in this way, your inbox will cease to be a Pandora’s Box, however full it might get while you’re concentrating on other things. You will now be in complete control: your inbox will be working for you, and not vice versa.

Even though I’m a tool vendor myself, I want to make it clear that better software cannot solve email overload. Better software can just alleviate the dire situation we’re all in. Two quite varied examples are anti-spam products and automatically color-coding your messages according to various criteria.

Don’t be fooled by any marketing message that says [product] will solve your email overload problems. It won’t. It can’t. Only you can solve your problems.

The reason for this is the fact that email overload is not the problem; it is just a symptom of the problem. Email overload is a result of:

• lack of organization
• bad work habits & lack of discipline
• lack of focus & concentration
• lack of training (none of us were trained to deal with such a deluge of information)

Email overload is a subjective feeling. When I regained full control of my email, I was still getting just as much email as before, but I no longer suffered from email overload. I had learned to handle it properly and still keep my balance. Although the feeling of email overload may be directly related to the height of the pile of unhandled emails in your inbox, the stress is compounded by all those other tasks that your email has been distracting you from completing.

A bad workman blames his tools

If you suffer from email overload, there is something wrong with you. There is probably something seriously wrong with your organization’s work culture as well, but don’t hide behind this: it does not mean that you have to keep suffering.

So how do we fix the situation? GTD is a good solution to the root-cause problems I mentioned above. But GTD requires practice and discipline, so it’s helpful to select tools that reinforce your good habits — the tools won’t do the work for you, but they can certainly make it easier to “stay on the wagon”.

Although I didn’t realize it then, this is why I developed SpeedFiler. I wanted to clear up the clutter in my inbox, but Outlook’s user interface made it too cumbersome for someone like me, who had 600+ folders in deep hierarchies (I have since learned to let go, and now use a somewhat flatter structure). SpeedFiler made it so easy to file my messages where they belonged, that I had no excuse for letting anything drop back in the inbox once I had read it and determined how it affected my work.

My users often get rather emotional when they describe what SpeedFiler has done for them (actually, they did it themselves; SpeedFiler just acted as a catalyst), and I, too, am captivated by the passion for productivity and the sustained burst of energy that comes from getting back in life’s driving seat.

One topic that is close to my heart and about which I have hard evidence that a few people are willing to listen, is how to cope with email overload.

Until recently, as a rather busy vice president in a security appliance company, I would receive 100 to 150 emails a day that somehow slipped through our spam filter, probably because they were related to my work in some remote way. The company culture was extremely collaborative, meaning that if you did something you were proud of, or had a marvellous idea (in your very subjective opinion), you rushed off an email to anyone in the company who in your opinion might marvel at your brilliance, or who ought to act on your wonderful idea.

A few people were aware of the atrocious signal-to-noise ratio in email traffic. In general, these responsible individuals were quite economical with the number of recipients of their messages, and generally addressed only the people who needed to know. However, this did not guarantee that their messages were clear. Often, the actionable issue, if there was one, was buried in a far flung corner of a long and rambling message, and even then you needed to be a clairvoyant in order to understand what they wanted you to do.

In short, four major problems were making email useless to me as an efficient medium of communication.

1. The sheer volume of potentially important email I was receiving.
2. Ineffective targeting: I was a direct recipient (TO:) or carbon copy recipient (CC:) on too many messages that were of no importance to me. These cluttered up my inbox, and I still had to waste time reading them in order to determine that they were ignorable.
3. Lack of clarity: facts presented haphazardly, long-winded explanations, and worst of all, no call to action.
4. I could not get what I needed from my colleagues, because they were suffering from the same problems.

In fact, it was well known that if you wanted to reach the CEO, you had to use the phone, because his email inbox was overflowing and was not being handled in a predictable manner. I’ve heard the same about other CEO’s too.
To compound these problems, the company ran on “internet time”. If you blinked, you risked missing something important. This meant that when the “incoming email” whistle sounded, you switched contexts from whatever important task you were doing to check the incoming message. Because the company has offices across the world, it also meant you checked email at home before going to sleep and again before getting into the car in the morning.

I’ve compared notes with a few colleagues, and reached the conclusion that this is pretty representative of many companies today. Snowballing email use, and the ability to interact and collaborate in real time with people across the world are taking a serious toll on our concentration, stress levels and general well-being. None of us were trained to work in this seemingly crazy environment, and most of us are underperforming.

Needless to say, I reached a crisis that demanded drastic action before I self-destructed. A number of things resulted from this crisis. I became acutely aware of my productivity level and the factors that affected it. I drastically modified my work habits, and also developed software to help me. Using David Allen’s Getting Things Done method, I managed to more than double my productivity within a few short weeks. I stopped needing to work at home in the evenings and I suddenly had time for my family. I was a human being again, and I felt good.

In this blog I’ll discuss many of the problems and solutions I’ve come across on my journey. Oh, and I’ll be shamelessly plugging my software, where it is relevant.