Scott Porad

I didn’t say, “even Buddha valued measuring progress“, my friend Justin did.  He was referring to this:

The Buddha asks the group why they are practicing these austerities, and one replies that they are wearing away their past karma and would end their suffering by not adding any additional karma. The Buddha asks if they know how much of their old karma they have worn away. They say, “No.” He then asks if they know how much they have left. Again they answer, “No.” Finally the Buddha asks if they even know for certain they existed in the past and have karma to wear away. Again they shake their heads and say, “No.” The Buddha replies that this is meaningless practice.

Recently, I was engaged in a discussion over e-mail with a group of friends.  The instigator of the discussion was presented a business opportunity at a good value, but was having a difficult time deciding whether or not to get involved because it wasn’t passive, that is, it would take some of his time.

I understand my friend’s conundrum: it was good opportunity, but time is so precious because in the busy rat race of America we’re all so overbooked, overscheduled, overextended and overcommitted.

Then, I was reminded of this post by Derek Sivers:

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying:

If I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

…

In other words: No more “yes”. It’s either “HELL YEAH!” or “no”.

And, another friend made this wise comment:

Close the door on small opportunities in order to focus on the big ones.

There’s the desktop clients: Outlook, Mac Mail and Thunderbird

And then there’s the web-based clients: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and so on.

You know what they all have in common?  They’re completely, totally and utterly broken.

F.U.B.A.R.  Fubizzle.  Yes, just plain ‘ol fubizzled.

Simply put, the problem is that the default view for these applications in the Inbox.  It should not be.  It should be the Task List.

Let me repeat that: the default view for a productivity application should be the Task List.

Think about it.  To be productive, tasks are what you need to do all day, not read e-mail.  I’m sure you get stuck in that trap of being focused on your Inbox all day long.  It’s dreadful.  You can read endless articles on the Interwebs about how your Inbox is not work.  Work is work, and tasks represent that work.

You know what your Inbox is?  It’s inbound messages.  Just like voice mail or snail mail or smoke signals.

The workflow should be this: sit down at your desk, look at your task list, and complete tasks.  Then, from time-to-time, check your messages…electronic, voice, paper and otherwise.  Some of those messages will need to be translated into tasks.  Others will not.  Those that do, make them tasks.  Then, go back to work.

I’ve written in the past about how to organize a task list.  But, that’s not the point of this e-mail.

The point is that the way these tools are designed are not inline with the productive working habits.  For me personally, they harm my productivity and this is so frustrating to me that I want to scream it from the mountain tops.  (Or, at least, from a mountain of e-mail!)

I think I might be getting a handle on my e-mail overload problems.   As I wrote in an earlier post, Work without E-mail: Is it Possible?:

I am drowning in e-mail, and it’s becoming less and less useful because I simply cannot keep up with the volume I receive every day. It’s a shame because a valuable form of communication is being lost. (Yes, I’ve tried all the InboxZero and GTD stuff…if the volume is too much, even those don’t work.)

I’m not getting any less e-mail these days, but I have devised a scheme which is helping me keep it under control.  The basic premise is that I am prioritizing e-mail by how directly it has been sent to me.  In the first section of this post, I will outline how I prioritize the mail, and in the second section I will explain how I process the mail.

Visual Version: I had a friend review this post, and he suggested that I need a visual, so I made this flowchart on my whiteboard, just for you!  (Click the image the full view.)

Prioritizing Inbound E-mail

Inbox: Sent To Me
The first principle of my scheme is this: the only e-mail that goes in my Inbox are e-mails where my own e-mail address is actually on the To: line.  All other e-mail is filtered out into folders (or labels in Gmail).  Period.

A friend suggested that this post needed a visual, so I made this flowchart on my whiteboard, just for you! (Click the image the full view.)

My theory is that if the sender sent the message directly to me—if they specifically identified me by name—then it definitely deserves my attention.  Not only is that logical…I mean, it’s common courtesy, right?

Beyond that, all other e-mail goes elsewhere.  CC’s, mailing lists, etc. are almost by definition less important because the sender didn’t explicitly send it to me.  (Yes, there are a few exceptions to this rule, but for the most part it’s true.)  Or, if not by definition, then for certain on average because while some are important, many are not.

From here on out, it’s simply how I sort all the rest of the mail.

CC: Carbon Copy
Next, I have a folder for e-mail where my address is on the CC: line.  These senders thought, “this is an e-mail Scott should be aware of, so I’ll CC: him.”  Again, intended for me, but not as important for things addressed directly to me.

Everything Else: Not to Me
Everything was explicitly not sent to me because my address was not on the To: or CC: line.  The person who sent it did not have me in mind when they sent it.  In 95% of the cases, it was sent to a mailing list to which I belong, so the sender was thinking of the group, not of me.

The problem with the e-mails sent to a group is that I don’t know how I relate to them.  I know my relationship to e-mail sent directly to me, or where I am CC:’d.  But, I don’t know my relationship to these e-mails.  I don’t know if the mail is important to me or not…I just know that it’s mail and it showed up in my Inbox.

Ultimately, these are the really pernicious e-mails because they cost a lot of time to figure out if they are important or not.  For example…

Have you ever been part of a long e-mail thread on a group e-mail alias?  This happens to me all the time.  When I read the mail for a the first time, I have to read it through to decide if it’s an important conversation for me to be a part of…which takes time.  If it is relevant, then great.  But, if not, it was a waste of time.  And, it’s a gift that keeps on giving: each time I get a reply to the thread another mail clutters up my inbox.

So, I have a folder called “Not to Me” for everything else where my e-mail address is neither on the To: or CC: lines.  But, wait…there’s more!

Known Relationships: Not all Mailing Lists are the Same
There’s one final adjustment to the system regarding mailing lists: not all lists are the same.  Shortly after I started dumping all of the e-mail “not to me” in one folder I realized I need to filter some of these messages out into their own folders.

For every person, these folders are not going to be the same for you as they are for me because each of us belong to different lists and groups.  But, here are my special folders for groups:

• Alerts (notifications from our web monitoring systems)
• Cheez Dev (our all developer alias)
• Cheez Tech (our all product team alias)
• Release Notifications (from our deployment system)
• Reports (for our automated daily scorecards)

The Magic of Processing
So, now that I have my e-mail all sorted, it’s time to explain how I process it.  That is, how I go through my e-mails and deal with them.  The beauty of the system I’ve devised is that it makes processing really easy.

Previously, I found that the biggest cost when reading my e-mail was the time that I had to spend figuring out if I needed to respond to the e-mail or not.  What makes this system easy is that I know the probability of whether or not I need to respond by the folder.

So, when I get to work and start reading my e-mail, here’s how I process:

1. Alerts and Release Notifications.  I never have to respond to these—they’re just informational, so all I need to do is skim them.
2. Reports.  These are also informational, but every once in awhile they need to be forwarded to someone with a question.  Pretty much, I cruise through them like I do the previous folders.
3. Cheez Dev and Cheez Tech.  These folders contain conversations that I might need or want to participate in, otherwise they’re just informational.  So, I can skim them like Alerts and Reports with only a small mindset tweak: I need to pay attention for any conversations that require my input.
4. CC’s.  CC’s are pretty much like Cheez Dev and Cheez Tech, although the topics vary much more widely.  As a result, the processing of each message takes a little longer because I need to read with more focus in order to understand the context.  That being said, the reply rate is the same as Cheez Dev and Cheez Tech.
5. Not to Me.  This is everything else, and it’s the lowest priority.  Pretty much, these get treated the same way as CC’s, although the reply rate is far less.
6. Inbox.  Honestly, I can get through all the above mail in 1/10th the time that I used to because the way the mail gets categorized into folders enables me to process it quickly.  Before, I had to spend time with each mail trying to figure out how much, if any, attention it required.  But, now I know, and the result is that I’m much faster at getting through them.

So, after I’ve cruised through the relatively unimportant messages, what’s left, of course, is the Inbox: stuff sent directly to me.  Just like before, I need to pay attention to every single one of these, and almost all of them require thoughtful comprehension and a reply.  They take time, no doubt, but they’re also the messages that deserve time.

So, that’s my system.  What do you think?

(Maybe I need to think of a name for it and give it a brand and get a trademark and become famous for teaching people how to scale a mountain of e-mail and live to tell about it.  Any ideas?)

One of the most interesting things I heard at WordCamp Seattle this weekend was from Scott Berkun who works at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He said that employees at Automattic, generally speaking, don’t communicate via e-mail.

I was intrigued.  I am drowning in e-mail, and it’s becoming less and less useful because I simply cannot keep up with the volume I receive every day.  It’s a shame because a valuable form of communication is being lost.  (Yes, I’ve tried all the InboxZero and GTD stuff…if the volume is too much, even those don’t work.)

And, I am not alone.  My friends at other companies the same complaint.  Last night, a friend who works at Microsoft made two interesting points over dinner.  First, that he assumed that other people didn’t read his e-mail, so anything that was important he had a conversation in person.  And, second, that before about 20 years ago, nobody had e-mail and the world worked just fine.  So, how is it that something which is seemingly good, like e-mail, seems to be so harmful?  (I supposed one way we could tackle this e-mail problem is to only use e-mail in a case where 20 years ago you would have sent a letter or fax.)

Anyhow, I digress.

Automattic, according to Berkun, uses three primary means of communication.

1. Skype, for instant messaging and voice/video calls.
2. Group chat (technically, IRC) for open forums for conversation.
3. Internal blogs.  The company has a number of blogs that cut across two main dimensions—teams and subjects.

So, I guess the way things work is that if you want to broadcast something to the whole company at Automattic, then you write it on a blog.  And, if you want to communicate with another person, then you do it in real-time via IM, chat or voice.  (I would imagine that if it’s a private subject that can’t go on a blog, then that happens using one of the “in-person” means.)  But, what you don’t do is sent off an e-mail that piles up into somebody’s inbox and just creates more work for them.

I asked Berkun how people kept up with all the blogs?  Basically, he said they used various notification tools.  Essentially, there are various ways to subscribe to a blog, such as RSS or even IM.  (Yes, you can have a WordPress blog as your “buddy” in IM!  Every time someone posts, a link is pushed to a message and sent to you.)  Berkun said there are even ways that the subscriptions can filter for words, so that any post which has his name in it…he gets a text message alerting him to it.

All of this is really fascinating and intriguing to me.  Can anybody from Automattic shed some light on how this works?  Is it true?  Can you teach us how it’s done?

Does anybody else work like this?  If so, how do you make it work?  I’m really interested in solving the e-mail problem, and would love your help.

All these posts about using time more productively reminded me of a book I read about 6 years ago called Time Tactics of Very Successful People.

The fact that I ever even read the book is completely random—my wife and I were staying in Chicago with one of her aunts, and I picked it off the shelf one evening for some bedtime reading.  Despite my expectations, it didn’t put me to sleep…in fact, I really learned some good stuff!

One productive time tactic that stuck with me was ensuring that I start the day prepared.  I don’t remember all the details of what the book proposed, but here’s how I took what the author wrote and adapted it:

Everyday, before I stop working for the day, while my mind is still fresh with the things I’m working on, I write a note stating where I left off and listing the 3-5 things I need to work on tomorrow.

As a result, when I start working the next morning, I haven’t forgotten what I was doing, and don’t spend the first 30 minutes of the day getting my barrings straight.  Instead, I can jump right into the day and start getting stuff done.

Yesterday’s post on being more productive in the morning reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay regarding manager versus maker time.

Paul’s simple point is that “doing work” requires a different type of mindset and workflow than “managing other people doing work”.  Most programmers completely agree, so I encourage you to read his essay.

One of the points that complete resonates with me is:

…there’s [a] way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

I couldn’t possibly agree with this more.  I feel like in order to be maximally productive, I have to have at least a 3-hour chunk of completely uninterrupted time.   And, sometimes that doesn’t even work…as Graham writes:

…one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Yes!  Absolutely!

Rereading Graham’s essay is going to cause me to be more careful about scheduling meetings at Cheezburger.

Right now, we only have two types of meetings: an all-team meeting at Monday morning, and several daily standups for smaller project teams.  Typically, those meetings are all held in the morning, and I’m going to work to keep them that way…perhaps designating the afternoon as “maker time”.  Although, that is incongruent with the whole “morning people are more productive” idea, so maybe the key is to move the meetings earlier in the morning.

I’m not sure…what are your thoughts on this?

Contrary to popular belief, I’m a nervous fellow. I like to be on time, I like to get there early, and when I make up my mind to do something, I definitely like to focus on getting it done now.

I’m sure this annoys my team at Cheezburger for a number of reasons which I shall enumerate via metaphor.

One must walk before they run. And, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It goes without saying that I agree with these sentiments. As I said, I get nervous; time allows opportunity for something to come along and derail the project. A derailed project is wasreful, and if there is anything I dislike more than yellow mustard, it is waste.

There’s an approach to web and software development intended to act as a salve against my worries. I think it could applied to most types of projects, though.

First, just make it work. Even if it’s ugly or klunky or kludgey. I often refer to this as “The Happy Path”; get the basic use cases that satisfy 80% of the users working.

At this point, there will still be a lot of rough edges, but at least you’ll have something functional to show off. Going forward, work on smoothing out the edges.

Next, make it fast. In other words, take out all those rough edges that cause your product to be slow and perform poorly.

Finally, make it pretty. This is the phase where you smooth out all of the user interface and experience issues. This includes the rough edges related to edge cases and look and feel. (One reason to consider why this step is last: what’s the point in smoothing out the UI if the product doesn’t function?)

Often, we follow this process at Cheezburger, and it tends to work in terms of productivity.

And, I worry less, too.

There’s an expression I’ve heard that says there are two types of work: working in your business and working on your business.  What’s the difference?

Working in your business is doing the work of making the business go.  For example, if you have a widget factory, you’re working in your business when you’re making widgets.

Working on your business is doing the work of improving the business.  For example, if you have a widget factory, you’re working on your business when you streamline your processes to produce more widgets at a lower cost.

There’s a Japanese work kaizen which literally means “improvement” but has come to reflect a philosophy of continuous and regular working on the business.

Last week, the CheezTech team made an effort at kaizen—we took an hour out of our busy schedules to talk about how we could improve our development processes and productivity.  The results, both practical and emotional, were remarkable.

At the end of our hour we walked away with three concrete changes to our processes.  And, we committed to meet again in a month to see how we’ve done, and look for other improvements.  The entire team felt great!

Today, several members of our team attended a conference and participated in an experiential session that used game-like activities to teach about teamwork and productivity.  In one of the activities, the group was divided in two teams and each team was asked to move as many baseballs as possible from here-to-there following certain rules.

We did it once, and our efficiency was measured.  Then, we were given exactly two minutes to discuss as a team how we could improve our process before we had to do it again.  Just two minutes of working on our business resulted in an almost 100% improvement in efficiency!

Not only did we learn the importance of taking a time-out to discuss improvements as a team, perhaps the most important lesson had to do with the difficulty of implementing changes “to the process” while “in process”.

During the first attempt, two of the 14 members of the team discovered an opportunity to streamline, but were unable to effectively communicate it to the rest of the team.  Since the whole team was busy working in the business, it unable to divert attention and communicate in order to make improvements on-the-fly.

The lesson here is clear: there is genuine value in taking small amounts of time to step outside of working in the business and gather as a team and discuss how improvements can be made to the business.  Taking this time to step aside is critical because it’s difficult to apply changes in-process.

I’m excited for this new aspect of our teamwork at Cheezburger.  By itself, introducing our monthly meeting is an excellent improvement.  I’ll report back you next month to tell you how it goes.

P.S. For those of you familiar with Agile and Scrum development methodologies, this type of kaizen practice is built into the methodology by way of the “sprint retrospective meeting”.

Customer service e-mail.  I genuinely love answering customer service e-mail.  Seriously, I’m not making this up.  I find real, genuine joy in helping our the fans and users of our web sites.  It makes my heart feel warm and smiley.

But, I’ll tell you, it backs up quickly.  Not to mention, there are a million other things we have to do at Cheezburger.  That’s the thing about building a web site: it’s never over—there are always improvements that can be made.

Honestly, sometimes it’s a little overwhelming and the never-ending-ness of it stresses me out.  Not in a horrible, ulcer-causing way, but in enough of a way to be a constant thread in the background.  Oh brother, how are we ever going to scale this mountain, I think.

What I’m trying to do is not think about it.  Thinking gets me nowhere, but doing results in progress.  To help with that, I keep a list of all the things to do which is important because that reduces the background noise in my head.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on just plugging away at things one item at a time.  They say that when you’re doing actual mountain climbing that you just need to keep on putting on foot in front of the other.  Don’t look up at the hill…just take the next step.  That’s what I’m trying to do.

If you’re a regular reader of this space, you know that I talk a lot about the metaphor of the journey of a thousand miles and a million steps.  I suppose this post is just another variation on that theme.  The lesson in this variation is that the key to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the size of the mountain is to simply focus on the step you’re currently taking, and don’t think about the next one until you’re done with the current and ready.