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Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos. A cap

by chime 16y ago

Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos. A capable assistant can very easily organize your email saving you the time to do what you do best. Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem. Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.

jacquesm 16y ago
Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it. He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand. That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating. Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month. edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.
- chime 16y ago
  You have a point about the low volume at 30/day. I've had 100+ emails a day in the past for long periods so I understand how bad it can get once things pile up. President of our company gets 100+ emails a day and could surely use some help. I've met quite a few good administrative assistants and they are aware of how trustworthy and reliable they have to be. They can just glance over an email body and if it sounds really personal, put it into the "personal" bucket. They can also reply to emails that just need a "Thanks" and forward other emails to appropriate people as necessary. If they take notes, they can describe all their activities to the mailbox owner in a few minutes. I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
- aquark 16y ago
  We don't know how many emails a day he was dealing with. Clearly, he wasn't ignoring email over this period, so many he was already keeping up with 30, 50, 100, 200 emails and this was just the excess.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That could be, he mentions 'unread', but reading 30 emails per day on top of whatever he already read is: - if it was low, not a big deal - if it was high, percentage wise not such a big issue So it would have to be somewhere in the middle, say around the 30 to 60 emails on top of the ones he's already receiving for it to be a 'big deal'. And even that does not seem to me to be an extraordinary high volume. The thousand backlogged emails is a big deal, that will take you two days at least to get rid of. But the majority of those probably does not require an answer, and if it hasn't been read in 30 days it probably wasn't very urgent either and you may be able to lose it entirely without it being a big deal. People should not become a 'slave to their inbox'.
- jedc 16y ago
  It's not 30 messages per day, it's 30 additional messages per day above and beyond what he is able to respond to already. (It's not like he went on holiday for a month and came back to 1k messages.) Imagine if you write and respond to e-mail constantly, and you still get 30 more than that, and you've described what Fred lives with. :)

by chime 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it. He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand. That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating. Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month. edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.

chime 16y ago
You have a point about the low volume at 30/day. I've had 100+ emails a day in the past for long periods so I understand how bad it can get once things pile up. President of our company gets 100+ emails a day and could surely use some help. I've met quite a few good administrative assistants and they are aware of how trustworthy and reliable they have to be. They can just glance over an email body and if it sounds really personal, put it into the "personal" bucket. They can also reply to emails that just need a "Thanks" and forward other emails to appropriate people as necessary. If they take notes, they can describe all their activities to the mailbox owner in a few minutes. I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
aquark 16y ago
We don't know how many emails a day he was dealing with. Clearly, he wasn't ignoring email over this period, so many he was already keeping up with 30, 50, 100, 200 emails and this was just the excess.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  That could be, he mentions 'unread', but reading 30 emails per day on top of whatever he already read is: - if it was low, not a big deal - if it was high, percentage wise not such a big issue So it would have to be somewhere in the middle, say around the 30 to 60 emails on top of the ones he's already receiving for it to be a 'big deal'. And even that does not seem to me to be an extraordinary high volume. The thousand backlogged emails is a big deal, that will take you two days at least to get rid of. But the majority of those probably does not require an answer, and if it hasn't been read in 30 days it probably wasn't very urgent either and you may be able to lose it entirely without it being a big deal. People should not become a 'slave to their inbox'.
jedc 16y ago
It's not 30 messages per day, it's 30 additional messages per day above and beyond what he is able to respond to already. (It's not like he went on holiday for a month and came back to 1k messages.) Imagine if you write and respond to e-mail constantly, and you still get 30 more than that, and you've described what Fred lives with. :)