February 27, 2013

The more efficient you email, the more time you spend emailing.

This may sound a little counter-intuitive but it’s easy to see why it’s true. If you get good at managing email then you start to use it for to-do lists, alerts, customer service, knowledge base, and so on. Plus, your responsiveness is inviting other people to email you even more.

The time you save by having a more efficient email system is offset by the new demands you put on it.

I think the same principle holds for many other productivity tools:

If you learn how to run efficient meetings, you’re going to start using them more often to get things done. Overall you’ll be spending more time in meetings than before.

If you get good at using your calendar, you’re going to start using it for reminders, birthdays, vacation plans, etc. and thus spend more time overall managing your calendar.

If you get good at Evernote, you’re going to start taking notes way more often and record things you didn’t even bother with before.

So if you want to spend less time doing email, just being more efficient isn’t going to help. Things like Mailbox, Boomerang, Taskforce, etc. only make you email more and faster .

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