by David Lee King on October 7, 2010
A couple weeks ago, I was wondering how much email I received and dealt with in a day. So I counted, and here’s what I ended up with – two email accounts, one day:
Gmail account:
- 75 emails received
- 13 emails already in my inbox
- What were they?
- 7 twitter requests
- 6 things I needed to know
- 2 replies to something I had sent the day before
- 7 things I had to do or respond to
- the rest was junk I deleted (discussion list things, subscription spam, etc)
During the day, I sent out 14 emails from this account, and ended up with 1 email in my inbox.
Work email account:
- 55 emails received
- 12 things already in my inbox
- What were they?
- 9 things I needed to know
- 2 interesting things
- 12 helpdesk emails
- 2 discussion list messages
- the rest was junk I deleted
During the day, I sent out 7 emails from this account, and ended up with Zero Inbox!
Total email received = 130
Emails sent by me = 21
And I think this was a SLOW email day for me!
Of course, email wasn’t the only thing I did all day long. There were meetings. There were projects I’m working on. There was at least one call to a vendor. Etc.
The point is this – I do real work via email. I’m guessing you do too. Decisions get made, projects get additional thoughts. Things I need to see get seen. Questions get answered (or asked). It really IS my In Box.
How about you? Is email an irritation you have to deal with so you can DO your “real work” … or do you see email (and the thoughts behind those emails) as part of your “real work?”
Tagged as:
Email,
getting things done,
real work,
work,
zero inbox
by David Lee King on September 9, 2010
Some people have told me they ask for volunteers to do blog posts or write content for their website. You know what happens there, right? Asking for volunteers works great … until the volunteer “gets busy” with their “real job.”
When people volunteer, they tend to think of the thing they volunteered to do as “extra work.” If it gets in the way of their real job, they’ll stop doing the volunteer work.
It’s not necessarily that they don’t want to do the web work. It’s simply this – the library hasn’t prioritized the web work (also insert Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc here).
No one asks for volunteers to work the reference desk, right? How about driving the bookmobile – does it only operate when a volunteer can get around to it?
I don’t think so. It should be the same with web work. Want it to happen? Don’t ask for volunteers. Assign job duties, then expect it to happen, just like working the desk or driving the bookmobile.
pic by LShave
Tagged as:
job duties,
volunteers,
web work,
work
by David Lee King on July 28, 2009
Remember that I told y’all about Bobbi Newman’s Day in the Life project? Well – here’s my contribution to that. Only doing one day, but boy – it was a doozy of a day!
So – My Day in the Life, in roughly chronological order:
- Met with Cafe staff to get firm pricing for breakfast/lunch for Podcamp Topeka
- Posted a reminder about Podcamp Topeka on Twitter
- Met with Communications Manager about a couple of “interesting” comments to a blog post on our library website
- Took down (closed, not deleted) a couple of comments
- Helped hunt down why some comments weren’t appearing on our website (fixed) and figured out a better way for me to get copied on comments (Feedburner RSS feed was too slow – now subscribed to the direct comment feed, which is much faster for some reason)
- Posted email to all staff in relation to comments and library policies (written with Communications Manager)…
- … then answered emails about THAT email
- Updated by Digital Services staff on our recent battles with the conflicker worm (we won) and our DVD Dispenser (electrical problem)
- Participated in a BCR Public Libraries Advisory Group conference call
- Had another conference call/meeting about comments on our website
- Proofread a galley proof of my upcoming LTR
- One more (late) meeting about the comment (no, it’s really NOT that bad – we just needed to figure out some procedural things, like what to say, who gets to say it, etc stuff)
Now I’m going home!
Tagged as:
day in the life,
work
A couple weeks ago, I was wondering how much email I received and dealt with in a day. So I counted, and here’s what I ended up with – two email accounts, one day:
