Attention Management Notes
Esther Dyson, the future of mail – and other topics via Michael Sippey.
More fundeamentally, as the world becomes more real-time and connected, the virtual and increasingly the actual configuration of the system is changing. There’s a rich, complex, shared data store in the cloud, and mail is simply the passing of notifications and alerts that tell you to pay attention to/download specific items in the cloud that are new or changed or that someone wants to share with you. this creates huge challenges in version control, updating and permission management.
Mark Hurst, Managing Incoming Email
In other words, clear out incoming e-mails before they pile up too high in the inbox. Delete most of them, file some of them (in mail folders or elsewhere), but most importantly, get them all out of the inbox before they really begin to pile up. Keep the inbox empty.
Esther makes more sense to me that Mark. But I like the idea of having a space where I keep things of immediate importance. I use email flags to do this instead of keeping my inbox empty (Thunderbird’s search function is a nice way to find things in my email, and works best when I keep things together) and use Thunderbird’s views to filter my messages to those I need to see.
I feel like gmail style tagging is the way to go for really making email useful. Thunderbird and other programs have simple versions of this, but most only allow 5 tags. Make it infinite. Let me tag things like I can in del.icio.us. Then let me filter on these tags quickly and easily.
Better yet, do like Esther says (and like Spotlight and Dashboard) and put it all (programs, documents, email, RSS feeds, etc) in a big pile and let me tag it as it passes by. That way I can come back later and filter out the good stuff when I need it.
Like Esther said, this is about attention management. Information passes by me very wuickly. It’s hard to keep up with it all. Let me quickly assign places to things (with tags) without having to establish fancy hierarchies.