{"id":2265,"date":"2009-10-08T20:16:41","date_gmt":"2009-10-08T20:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gleamynode.net\/articles\/2265\/catching-up-unread-messages"},"modified":"2022-12-28T01:44:56","modified_gmt":"2022-12-27T16:44:56","slug":"catching-up-unread-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vault.motd.kr\/wordpress\/posts\/2265\/catching-up-unread-messages\/","title":{"rendered":"Catching Up Unread Messages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone dreams about <a href=\"http:\/\/inboxzero.com\/inboxzero\/\">Inbox Zero<\/a>, but the reality is cruel. I couldn\u2019t stand the ever-increasing number of my unread messages, so I did a very simple math.<br \/>\nFirst off, the following list summarizes the average number of incoming messages for each day of week.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sat+Sun+Mon: 90 msgs\/day<\/li>\n<li>Tue: 110 msgs\/day<\/li>\n<li>Wed: 115 msgs\/day<\/li>\n<li>Thu: 180 msgs\/day<\/li>\n<li>Fri: 100 msgs\/day (somewhat large deviation)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One interesting property of this data is that the beginning of a week looks like Tuesday. It\u2019s because most employees are distributed in North America and Europe while I live in South Korea, which is a minor time zone.<br \/>\nI subscribed to 169 blogs, and that is about 40 new posts per day.<br \/>\nCurrently, I have 1850 unread messages and 483 unread blog posts. (Depressed) After the simplistic math, now I can at least <strong>guess<\/strong> how many messages and blog posts I have to read to improve the current situation.<br \/>\nHowever, there are so many things to figure out. How many hours should I spend for reading e-mails and blogs? Should I spend my whole day for catching up the incoming messages on Thursday, where 180 messages come from? Is this a large amount or not considering that I am a remote worker of a global company?<br \/>\nI vaguely guess this issue might be because I am still not used to multi time zone collaboration via e-mail.<br \/>\nUnlike instant messaging and offline conversations, e-mail does not require immediate attention. Because of this property, e-mail decreases the cost of context switching while it increases the size of the backlog. Although the cost of context switching is known to be a major cause of poor productivity, the psychological pressure of the increasing backlog shouldn\u2019t be ignored. The famous <a title=\"Getting Things Done\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity\/dp\/0142000280\/\"><span class=\"caps\">GTD<\/span><\/a> book dedicates its whole pages about the backlog problem.<br \/>\nWhat makes the backlog problem worse is working in a minor time zone. If you get up in the morning, it\u2019s usual to see about 100 messages which were sent overnight. As the backlog gets longer, it costs more effort to catch up the discussion. Moreover, you often end up with just \u2018catching up\u2019 rather than \u2018actively participating\u2019 because it\u2019s too late. It sometimes makes a depressed start of a day.<br \/>\nHow should I overcome this? I can\u2019t think of a good solution. I am already busy enough with merely catching up. It\u2019s time to deal with it actively instead of leaning on vague optimism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone dreams about Inbox Zero, but the reality is cruel. I couldn\u2019t stand the ever-increasing number of my unread messages, so I did a very simple math. First off, the following list summarizes the average number of incoming messages for each day of week. Sat+Sun+Mon: 90 msgs\/day Tue: 110 msgs\/day Wed: 115 msgs\/day Thu: 180&#8230; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/vault.motd.kr\/wordpress\/posts\/2265\/catching-up-unread-messages\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&#8594;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<title>Catching Up Unread Messages &#8212; T&#039;s message of the day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vault.motd.kr\/wordpress\/posts\/2265\/catching-up-unread-messages\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catching Up Unread Messages &#8212; T&#039;s message of the day\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Everyone dreams about Inbox Zero, but the reality is cruel. I couldn\u2019t stand the ever-increasing number of my unread messages, so I did a very simple math. First off, the following list summarizes the average number of incoming messages for each day of week. Sat+Sun+Mon: 90 msgs\/day Tue: 110 msgs\/day Wed: 115 msgs\/day Thu: 180... 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