6 ms·

Inbox Ten

57 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

KaiserPro 2y ago
"I have the luxury of an army of support staff to control the flow of information to me, for I am the peak of the information pyramid" He has a sortof point which is you need to sift through the noise to get the signal. The issue is, and he's very much shielded from this, is that most places have a massive amount of noise, and its impossible to keep up. If its my job to be the "decider" as he likes to be, and I am the top of the pyramid, then its trivial to be informed all the time. If I have to do other things as well as this, then its hard. At smaller companies I had an information network, which meant I was very well informed. I could, if I needed to, broker information. At a large FAANG, and not living in the main country, that is impossible. You are reliant on third parties who you don't know personally.
rsstack 2y ago
"If someone sends me a chat that isn’t time sensitive, I redirect them to email" I have a private Linear project, and I use the Linear-Slack integration to create issues from non-urgent chat messages. Being in Linear means I can track and label issues and link them it to related issues in public projects. Of course, only if "Remind me in 3 hours" isn't good enough. I do the same thing for GitHub mentions / PR requests: They automatically open a private Linear issue, and I triage them twice a day. I try to respond during the triage process if it's a short response and if not, put a due date for later. If someone needs an urgent response (rarely), then they can Slack me to get my immediate attention.
frenchie4111 2y ago
"You feel well informed and rarely hear new information secondhand." I am not sure I agree with the premise that I should not expect to hear information secondhand. I find it fairly effective to have a network of well connected individuals in the org who will ping me when there is new information I need to know about. We help each other stay more disconnected (and productive) by acting as information filters/forwarders. I allow these people to have interrupt privileges for me because I know if they are sending me a notification it has been vetted for urgency
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  I read this part of the post as being less about someone telling you something directly about something, but more about accidentally finding something out in the course of some other conversation.
  - frenchie4111 2y ago
    That is fair
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    The word should be 'off-hand' not second-hand in that case.
jp57 2y ago
Nice. I've landed on a very similar regime for myself that I've been calling Near-zero Inbox. Originally it was Inbox-Zero-by-EOW, with the goal of having my inbox empty by the end of the workday on Friday, I always end up with one or two items that I need to leave for action on Monday. One technique that has gotten traction in my organization is the notion of "email bankruptcy" and "slack bankruptcy". I.e. if you find your email or slack debt getting too big to handle, you simply declare bankruptcy, archive everything (or everything older than a day or two), and start fresh. If you are very far behind, the downsides of doing this seem to be no worse than the alternatives. When I shifted from IC engineering work to management I found that I gradually became overwhelmed with email and other comms from a lot of people who now either wanted my opinion or felt I needed to be informed about a lot of things I previously wouldn't have been involved in. Oddly, but maybe not surprisingly, I found that there was positive correlation between the size of my email backlog and how crowded my calendar was, and that the causality seemed to operate in a feedback loop. If I had too many meetings it got harder to keep up with email, and if I didn't answer emails, I got invited to more meetings. Practicing near-zero inbox actually gave me more time, instead of less.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Email bankruptcy is an annoying policy for people in a work environment and a cataclysmic policy in a personal environment. In a work environment people will be pissed off when they have to remind you a week later about a thing they email you on. In a personal environment you might miss an important payment and face some ugly consequence.
  - xboxnolifes 2y ago
    If your already so far behind on email to declare bankruptcy, they're already a week late. This applies to both personal and business. And I cannot think of a personal scenario where missing a single email about payment would be a catastrophic issue. The only types of payments I deal with through email would just be resolved by receiving a follow up email.
- mattw2121 2y ago
gradschoolfail 2y ago
Would like to remind of the context that this is Bosworth’s blog. Agrippa to the Augustus. Before trying to shame him, consider that he might have learnt his lessons the hard way.
karaterobot 2y ago
> You confidently redirect them to the proper channel. For example I often respond to chat messages that are not urgent with a simple “Thanks, please email this to me and I’ll take a look.” Cut to me, in my house, flipping off your Slack message. Respond, or mark as unread, don't confidently ask me to do extra, completely redundant work for you.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  You’re the one asking him a question. Why do you even think you are owed a response?
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    I'm tempted not to respond.
- alexwebb2 2y ago
  Yeah, this jumped out to me as especially insane. That's what the Save feature is for! When someone Slacks me something that's clearly non-urgent, I just hit Save on it and come back to it later. No big deal. It's actually a wildly useful and probably underutilized feature. Requiring others to message you _just so_ to match your own particular idiosyncrasies, because you insist on bending reality to your will rather than working in the same plane as everyone else, makes for a colleague that others dread interacting with.
  - mattw2121 2y ago
    Why do your idiosyncrasies trump his?
    - kmoser 2y ago
      Your question raises the important point that communication involves constant negotiation of different attributes (time, medium of preference, tone, etc.). Those who are good at it will read the room, and sometimes make exceptions so they don't come across as draconian or out of touch. Did somebody gently redirect you to email instead of Slack when you felt Slack was your medium of choice? You can always respond with, "Sorry, email doesn't work for me because [reasons], please reply here, thanks!" Everything is a negotiation. Get good at negotiating and these issues become trivial.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Articles like this kill me. Surely the time you spent promoting the thing put you back into the hole, if the effort needs such ruthless optimization. I don't think it, or really most jobs, do. Rather, things like this serve to aggrandize. We get the information to do work. It doesn't exist alone, there's another side/counterpart. These one-dimensional things are, well, limited. If you're there to regurgitate information, it's a communication problem - not staffing. Well, kind of - but not in a way that's favorable to you. You're neither a producer or consumer, if hoarding is your primary focus edit: CTO for Meta, lol. How high in the clouds.
chopete3 2y ago
>> I am currently the CTO. I am a sucker for super optimization. To not get sucked into these too much or take most of the points seriously I look at the role or situation they are in. This is applicable for somebody in that situation.
xwowsersx 2y ago
Nah, no thanks. This is a losing battle. The "better" you are at email and the more responsive you are, the more email you'll get. Each prompt response sets a precedent, signaling your availability and encouraging more frequent communication. As your efficiency increases, so does the expectation for promptness, leading to an ever-growing volume of emails. Just opt out of staying on top of email and similar things.
- Cyphase 2y ago
  Your particular point could be solved by an optionally overridable delay on responses. I agree that optimizing for "respond to all things promptly" could lead to what you're saying. That doesn't need to be what you're optimizing for, solely. If being good at email brings more high value email, well, that's one of those good problems maybe. If it brings more low value email, treat the low value email differently. Or rather, treat all email as what it is. I'm not saying there's no place at all for purposefully delayed responses.
- DANmode 2y ago
  Keeping your replies infrequent, or short, has little to do with your inbox being a wasteland of ineffectiveness.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. -- Donald Knuth
- kmoser 2y ago
  > Just opt out of staying on top of email and similar things. People who do that go to the bottom of my "would hire again" list. I like working with people who communicate in a timely manner. Nothing wrong with replying, "I' busy today, I'll get back to you after the weekend" if you want to get off the hamster wheel of replying in a timely manner without being a jerk.
- throwaway211 2y ago
  This is when you start billing other departments.
teeray 2y ago
This all sounds great until you’re physically unable to work your system for an extended period of time (vacation out of cell range, illness, hospitalization, etc.). Then the pristine castle of information routing is buried under a pile of inputs and the only way out is inbox bankruptcy. If it’s important they’ll mention it again.
- DANmode 2y ago
  Unsubscribe from, or auto filter, some things. Or make a second inbox. This is a horrific way to live.
- DANmode 2y ago
  > If it’s important they’ll mention it again. I can't stop thinking about this. Is this ubiquitous anywhere? Anywhere healthy? As someone in the middle of cold-contacting potential cofounders - how many more of you exist?

57 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

"I have the luxury of an army of support staff to control the flow of information to me, for I am the peak of the information pyramid" He has a sortof point which is you need to sift through the noise to get the signal. The issue is, and he's very much shielded from this, is that most places have a massive amount of noise, and its impossible to keep up. If its my job to be the "decider" as he likes to be, and I am the top of the pyramid, then its trivial to be informed all the time. If I have to do other things as well as this, then its hard. At smaller companies I had an information network, which meant I was very well informed. I could, if I needed to, broker information. At a large FAANG, and not living in the main country, that is impossible. You are reliant on third parties who you don't know personally.

rsstack 2y ago

"If someone sends me a chat that isn’t time sensitive, I redirect them to email" I have a private Linear project, and I use the Linear-Slack integration to create issues from non-urgent chat messages. Being in Linear means I can track and label issues and link them it to related issues in public projects. Of course, only if "Remind me in 3 hours" isn't good enough. I do the same thing for GitHub mentions / PR requests: They automatically open a private Linear issue, and I triage them twice a day. I try to respond during the triage process if it's a short response and if not, put a due date for later. If someone needs an urgent response (rarely), then they can Slack me to get my immediate attention.

frenchie4111 2y ago

"You feel well informed and rarely hear new information secondhand." I am not sure I agree with the premise that I should not expect to hear information secondhand. I find it fairly effective to have a network of well connected individuals in the org who will ping me when there is new information I need to know about. We help each other stay more disconnected (and productive) by acting as information filters/forwarders. I allow these people to have interrupt privileges for me because I know if they are sending me a notification it has been vetted for urgency

dannyobrien 2y ago
I read this part of the post as being less about someone telling you something directly about something, but more about accidentally finding something out in the course of some other conversation.
- frenchie4111 2y ago
  That is fair
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  The word should be 'off-hand' not second-hand in that case.

jp57 2y ago

Nice. I've landed on a very similar regime for myself that I've been calling Near-zero Inbox. Originally it was Inbox-Zero-by-EOW, with the goal of having my inbox empty by the end of the workday on Friday, I always end up with one or two items that I need to leave for action on Monday. One technique that has gotten traction in my organization is the notion of "email bankruptcy" and "slack bankruptcy". I.e. if you find your email or slack debt getting too big to handle, you simply declare bankruptcy, archive everything (or everything older than a day or two), and start fresh. If you are very far behind, the downsides of doing this seem to be no worse than the alternatives. When I shifted from IC engineering work to management I found that I gradually became overwhelmed with email and other comms from a lot of people who now either wanted my opinion or felt I needed to be informed about a lot of things I previously wouldn't have been involved in. Oddly, but maybe not surprisingly, I found that there was positive correlation between the size of my email backlog and how crowded my calendar was, and that the causality seemed to operate in a feedback loop. If I had too many meetings it got harder to keep up with email, and if I didn't answer emails, I got invited to more meetings. Practicing near-zero inbox actually gave me more time, instead of less.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
Email bankruptcy is an annoying policy for people in a work environment and a cataclysmic policy in a personal environment. In a work environment people will be pissed off when they have to remind you a week later about a thing they email you on. In a personal environment you might miss an important payment and face some ugly consequence.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  If your already so far behind on email to declare bankruptcy, they're already a week late. This applies to both personal and business. And I cannot think of a personal scenario where missing a single email about payment would be a catastrophic issue. The only types of payments I deal with through email would just be resolved by receiving a follow up email.
mattw2121 2y ago

gradschoolfail 2y ago

Would like to remind of the context that this is Bosworth’s blog. Agrippa to the Augustus. Before trying to shame him, consider that he might have learnt his lessons the hard way.

karaterobot 2y ago

> You confidently redirect them to the proper channel. For example I often respond to chat messages that are not urgent with a simple “Thanks, please email this to me and I’ll take a look.” Cut to me, in my house, flipping off your Slack message. Respond, or mark as unread, don't confidently ask me to do extra, completely redundant work for you.

lazyasciiart 2y ago
You’re the one asking him a question. Why do you even think you are owed a response?
- karaterobot 2y ago
  I'm tempted not to respond.
alexwebb2 2y ago
Yeah, this jumped out to me as especially insane. That's what the Save feature is for! When someone Slacks me something that's clearly non-urgent, I just hit Save on it and come back to it later. No big deal. It's actually a wildly useful and probably underutilized feature. Requiring others to message you _just so_ to match your own particular idiosyncrasies, because you insist on bending reality to your will rather than working in the same plane as everyone else, makes for a colleague that others dread interacting with.
- mattw2121 2y ago
  Why do your idiosyncrasies trump his?
  - kmoser 2y ago
    Your question raises the important point that communication involves constant negotiation of different attributes (time, medium of preference, tone, etc.). Those who are good at it will read the room, and sometimes make exceptions so they don't come across as draconian or out of touch. Did somebody gently redirect you to email instead of Slack when you felt Slack was your medium of choice? You can always respond with, "Sorry, email doesn't work for me because [reasons], please reply here, thanks!" Everything is a negotiation. Get good at negotiating and these issues become trivial.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Articles like this kill me. Surely the time you spent promoting the thing put you back into the hole, if the effort needs such ruthless optimization. I don't think it, or really most jobs, do. Rather, things like this serve to aggrandize. We get the information to do work. It doesn't exist alone, there's another side/counterpart. These one-dimensional things are, well, limited. If you're there to regurgitate information, it's a communication problem - not staffing. Well, kind of - but not in a way that's favorable to you. You're neither a producer or consumer, if hoarding is your primary focus edit: CTO for Meta, lol. How high in the clouds.

chopete3 2y ago

>> I am currently the CTO. I am a sucker for super optimization. To not get sucked into these too much or take most of the points seriously I look at the role or situation they are in. This is applicable for somebody in that situation.

xwowsersx 2y ago

Nah, no thanks. This is a losing battle. The "better" you are at email and the more responsive you are, the more email you'll get. Each prompt response sets a precedent, signaling your availability and encouraging more frequent communication. As your efficiency increases, so does the expectation for promptness, leading to an ever-growing volume of emails. Just opt out of staying on top of email and similar things.

Cyphase 2y ago
Your particular point could be solved by an optionally overridable delay on responses. I agree that optimizing for "respond to all things promptly" could lead to what you're saying. That doesn't need to be what you're optimizing for, solely. If being good at email brings more high value email, well, that's one of those good problems maybe. If it brings more low value email, treat the low value email differently. Or rather, treat all email as what it is. I'm not saying there's no place at all for purposefully delayed responses.
DANmode 2y ago
Keeping your replies infrequent, or short, has little to do with your inbox being a wasteland of ineffectiveness.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. -- Donald Knuth
kmoser 2y ago
> Just opt out of staying on top of email and similar things. People who do that go to the bottom of my "would hire again" list. I like working with people who communicate in a timely manner. Nothing wrong with replying, "I' busy today, I'll get back to you after the weekend" if you want to get off the hamster wheel of replying in a timely manner without being a jerk.
throwaway211 2y ago
This is when you start billing other departments.

teeray 2y ago

This all sounds great until you’re physically unable to work your system for an extended period of time (vacation out of cell range, illness, hospitalization, etc.). Then the pristine castle of information routing is buried under a pile of inputs and the only way out is inbox bankruptcy. If it’s important they’ll mention it again.

DANmode 2y ago
Unsubscribe from, or auto filter, some things. Or make a second inbox. This is a horrific way to live.
DANmode 2y ago
> If it’s important they’ll mention it again. I can't stop thinking about this. Is this ubiquitous anywhere? Anywhere healthy? As someone in the middle of cold-contacting potential cofounders - how many more of you exist?