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Time management and efficiency is a trap for the striver. Work smarter, not harder has always been a fundamental truism.

I've seen time and again people working like donkeys, and pitching whatever they do to exec management. Half the time they eyeroll when the pitch is over because some buzzword wasn't incanted or the speaker said something that sounded like a thing that went bad in the previous meeting.

Personally, inbox zero is an impossibly. (I think I'm at 15k unready right now) I have a gatekeeper for strangers, read emails from about 20 people and read priorities. The rest either doesn't need my attention, or folks will figure it out, or it will get bumped in the priority list.

As a result I'm sane and work 40-45 hours a week. One of my colleagues feels compelled to answer everything. He doesn't realize that he's just enabling dependency from others and is working 60 hours a week, every week.




You can have both. I have 0 unread emails cause the garbage goes to spam, the unimportant is marked as read and everything else is read every X hours.

The difference is probably ignore vs mass mark as read.

I find it useful cause I have a small diff for each check.

Think of it as Continuous Integration for email :)


I used to do something like that until I had to testify in a deposition about such things for a day or two. Never again.

Now I ignore, delete after a set period of time and have a written procedure in my home directory.




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