{"id":797,"date":"2013-09-05T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=797"},"modified":"2013-09-22T09:28:29","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T08:28:29","slug":"3-getting-to-an-empty-inbox-the-key-is-fifo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/3-getting-to-an-empty-inbox-the-key-is-fifo\/","title":{"rendered":"3. Getting to an empty inbox – the key is FIFO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"techtipsfortradeunionists\"<\/a>Everyone struggles to cope with massive numbers of emails — but there are tried and proven ways to manage this and one of the oldies-but-goodies remains FIFO.<\/p>\n

That stands for First In, First Out<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Or in Plain English — answer the oldest messages first.<\/p>\n

This is not always easy.<\/p>\n

In many email clients, like Gmail, you’re shown the newest messages first and you’ll likely try to answer them as they come in.<\/p>\n

But this is the worst way to cope with an inbox, as it turns email into a live chat rather than what it was designed to be — asynchronous communication<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That’s a fancy way of saying: emails should be answered when you have the time to answer them, and not the way you answer the phone — when it rings.<\/p>\n

As Gmail is very bad at sorting your emails in reverse chronological order, I’m going to suggest something different later in this series.<\/p>\n

But even in Gmail, you can get to the oldest messages and answer them first.<\/p>\n

You can even set yourself goals — such as having no messages in your inbox older than one week, or older than 48 hours.<\/p>\n

Eventually, you may get down to 24 hours, which is my personal goal.<\/p>\n

That means if you write to me, I’ll try to get an answer to you within 24 hours — but others who got here first will get answered first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone struggles to cope with massive numbers of emails — but there are tried and proven ways to manage this and one of the oldies-but-goodies remains FIFO. That stands for First In, First Out. Or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-tips-for-trade-unionists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":798,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions\/798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}