What We're Reading Now

Email Really Is Pretty Great

3 March 2015

Allison read her first email from her 11-year old nephew, George, and appreciated the reminder that email really is pretty great even if it does feel seriously overwhelming some days.

Tags: allison read, balance, email, time management and prioritization

Like most people I know I sometimes struggle with the overwhelming number of emails that seem to come in every day. Recently, more of my clients seem to be struggling with this problem, too. A few are getting some pretty difficult feedback from their colleagues about being unresponsive. I last wrote about this topic on 9 September 2013, Are You Drowning in Email?

In the 18 months since I wrote that post, I've been trying to do a better job of following the email management system David Allen recommends in his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I've made a lot of progress I'm proud of; however, I've only really embraced all of his rules in the last two weeks. I try hard to practice what I preach and as I've been helping some clients struggle with this topic, I realized that I needed to embrace the whole system myself before trying to help others to do so.

I think Allen's approach is sort of working for me, but it also requires a lot of discipline, breaking old habits, and creating new ones. Honestly, it's all a little exhausting and I was just rolling my eyes thinking that the whole process is stupid and will never work for me (so dramatic!) even though I always tell clients that two weeks is too soon to evaluate an experiment like this.

Just as I was struggling today to figure out if I even want to stick with this new disclipine, I got an email from my 11-year old nephew, George. He just got his first email account and is SO excited about it. I could feel the thrill in his message and was so happy that he wanted to share this news with me and that he's hoping we can catch up over email. (Of course we can!)

My nephew (and Allison Partners guest blogger) inspires, educates, and delights me all the time, but his first email was especially well-timed today. In the midst of my struggles to figure out how to manage my email, it was awesome to get a reminder that email really is pretty great. So with George's cheerful note, I'm going to settle down and stick with my email management experiment for at least another four weeks. I'll report back then.

« Return to What We're Reading Now