About 2 weeks ago I cracked. I couldn't take it any more and I just had to clear out my email inbox. I took it down from 2200 items to just 0 but it took me all morning. I've decided to Take Back My Life and in doing so, I'm managing my email blood pressure. This past two weeks I've managed to keep the underlying level (let's call it the diastolic level) at no more than 20 items. These are my work-in-progress and each one is marked with a colored "follow up" flag - prioritized form hot to cold colors. Meanwhile, the new items arrive in a pulse. If I had to measure my systolic level (the level of email sampled ever hour at the end of meetings), it is around 40. That's right, if I go away for an hour I get about 20 new emails. Most of them are noise and I've become ruthless with the delete button. Everything else I read quickly and file in a person folder by topic or sender.

So consider this, I probably need 30% of my day just to manage my email blood pressure and keep it under control. If the incoming rate gets above 20 an hour, I crack and can't keep up with the pace, or if the signal to noise ratio rises and I get more mail that I need to deal with, then same thing. The result is a growing inbox of unprocessed and often unread email. During the Beta 3 period of Team Foundation Server, I was getting 400 emails a day. My inbox can get to 2000 items in a week with a resultant half day productivity loss trying to fix it. The result is that I sit in the evening with mindless TV on TiVo and clean my inbox. If you want to get your mail read, you need to learn How to Communicate with Me or your note might be in the bit bucket.

This leads me to thinking that there must be a better way. So when, I wonder will the Outlook team discover the concepts of Drum-Buffer-Rope and Kanban and start applying them to the email system? Now my friends at Personify Design have made TeamLook an Outlook UI for Team Foundation Server. Imagine that, all those emails about developer tasks and bugs and all that stuff can go away, simply a TeamLook view on the work item history. Now imagine if we could start to marry my ideas and create a different kind of email system? I wish! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Outlook, Team+System, Visual+Studio