My work e-mail had become a mess. Over the last two months I've been assigned about 4+ new projects to work on and track progress on, and I've been noticing I'm feeling lost and unproductive. Too much attempting to remember tasks and progress and requests, and not enough work pushing those items out of my memory and out of unsearchable, unstructured, untrackable e-mail threads. Today I went through every e-mail in my inbox and did the 4 Ds. Delete, do, delegate, defer. I deleted the majority of them, most e-mails are simply zero information status garbage. It only takes about a second to know something is garbage so these are pretty low overhead. I did almost nothing while actually combing through. Most e-mails were so old I'd either finished the project associated or some deadline had passed and it was irrelevant anyway. Otherwise the doing was moving information out of e-mail and in the wiki page I'd created. I delegated almost nothing. But I may later.
jared simpson; programming; math; learning; commentary