The 5,000 email backlog

First, there was the big important software release - so important that I just had to stop reading email to get it done. Then, there was a trip to Hawaii for a friend's wedding (not that I'm complaining...) Then, another trip, this time to Australia for another friend's wedding and my brother's 30th birthday. And when I got back, all our big important projects were behind schedule and again needed my undivided attention. Not to mention my understandable addiction to playing with my new iPhone.

The result: over 5,000 unread emails in my inbox, and a 20cm-high stack of unread paper in my in tray. Panic sets in...

I am a devout believer in GTD and its core tenet - what Merlin Mann calls "Inbox Zero" - the importance of clearing the inboxes completely. So while some people routinely have hundreds or even thousands of read emails in their inbox with no intention of ever reading them again, for me, all of these emails need processing. It's a major backlog.

According to GTD, what I am supposed to do is go through each email, one by one, and decide what, if anything, needs to be done about it. Normally I would do this starting with the most recent first, because making decisions on the oldest email first might prove to be a waste of time or even a mistake when I see a later follow-up from someone else. But the key idea is to not try to sort or organise them - just grind through them one at a time until they're all gone.

Now, one of the problems with this is that at full-pace, I can process only about 100 emails per hour. If I go any faster than that, it's usually because I'm not really looking at them, so quality "Next Action" decisions aren't being made. Another big problem is that when I look at a recent email that's based on a long-running discussion, often the bottom of the email doesn't contain the full history of the discussion so far, because several email threads have been going on in parallel. So I find myself not being able to determine the next action, because I don't know what the hell everyone's talking about.

I have also read and enjoyed DIT, which includes a very interesting and simple solution to backlogs: Just move it all aside into a folder labelled "Backlog", and start from scratch. The idea is not to ignore all those emails, but to at least establish a baseline of processing everything completely each day, while chipping away at the backlog until it is gone. It's a great motivational approach, since you get the satisfaction of seeing an empty inbox immediately, and you have an easy way of knowing that at least it's not getting worse!

But the problem with the DIT backlog approach is the same as GTD, in that every time you get a new email about something, you don't have an easy way of getting "caught up" on the discussion so far. I've found this to be particularly difficult because I have about 200 projects (some big, many small) running in parallel.

So I'm trying something new, which is forbidden by both GTD and DIT: categorising my backlog.

Last weekend, I went into the office, sat down in front of Outlook for a marathon 12-hour session, and very quickly moved all 5,000+ emails out of my inbox and into folders created for each of the many projects, and for those that weren't specifically related to a project, I made folders for the team/department that it came from. For a long time, I've had my Outlook set up to display messages grouped by conversation thread, so I was able to just check the subject line and make a decision about which folder to stuff with each thread - sometimes moving 20 or 30 messages in one go. I got the whole lot sorted in just under 12 hours, so that's a bit over 400 emails per hour. (Note that the emails still weren't read/processed at this point, so in GTD & DIT terms, nothing had been achieved.)

So this got me the DIT-style "backlog", with the attendant instant gratification of seeing an empty inbox for the first time in weeks. So what was the point of sorting it all into folders? Well, now when I'm processing my inbox for the day, I can take a new conversation thread, move it into the appropriate folder, then read all of the backlog for that project in one go, from oldest to newest, so I am completely "caught up" on all discussions for the project before making any Next Action decisions. I would expect to make several NA decisions for the project, but then I can delete the entire folder because it's completely processed.

So this solves both the problem of not knowing the background of the discussion so far, and as a bonus gives me a nice feeling when I delete that folder, because I know that a big chunk of my backlog has disappeared. Before long, I expect to have few enough folders left in my backlog, that I get inspired to just crank through all of them and be done with it.

Anyway, that's the theory. Now let's see how it works in practice. Should be interesting... At any rate, if this doesn't work I'll just have to declare Email Bankruptcy.