This is great advice. Notifications are a horrible, attention-breaking plague on humanity.
On the other hand, when my boss emails me, I kind of need to see that immediately. So disabling notifications across the board isn't feasible. There's an interaction between technolgy and work culture here that isn't trivial.
I've had limited success building out rules in Outlook/Gmail/Mail that control if/when I see notifications. The problem is that every email client I've seen applies a rule immediately when the email arrives. What I really want is something more like an SLA: "I want to read incoming email within 15 minutes, and reply within 30 minutes."
Years ago, I threw together a bit of AppleScript I called my languishing email script. (That script is really old. You have been warned.) It scanned my inbox, and popped up a little notification if an email had been unread for longer than 10 minutes, or I hadn't replied to it within 20. My daily email-related interruptions went from 40-50 to a handful.
I'd love to know of a service/plugin/app that does this for all the common email clients/services. I think there's plenty of demand for something that offers more expressive & flexible email handling rules.
Thanks for sharing your experience. As a developer, I would hate if my boss expected me to be so proactive with email. S/He should be the most understanding and the most interested on me being as productive as possible.
Of course, not all circumstances are the same, so this is just general advice. There is no such thing as a "best practice" that applies to each and every situation.
Regarding your question about email rules, I think you have a business or open source idea there. :)
Thanks again!
Dan
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This is great advice. Notifications are a horrible, attention-breaking plague on humanity.
On the other hand, when my boss emails me, I kind of need to see that immediately. So disabling notifications across the board isn't feasible. There's an interaction between technolgy and work culture here that isn't trivial.
I've had limited success building out rules in Outlook/Gmail/Mail that control if/when I see notifications. The problem is that every email client I've seen applies a rule immediately when the email arrives. What I really want is something more like an SLA: "I want to read incoming email within 15 minutes, and reply within 30 minutes."
Years ago, I threw together a bit of AppleScript I called my languishing email script. (That script is really old. You have been warned.) It scanned my inbox, and popped up a little notification if an email had been unread for longer than 10 minutes, or I hadn't replied to it within 20. My daily email-related interruptions went from 40-50 to a handful.
I'd love to know of a service/plugin/app that does this for all the common email clients/services. I think there's plenty of demand for something that offers more expressive & flexible email handling rules.
Hi Christopher,
Thanks for sharing your experience. As a developer, I would hate if my boss expected me to be so proactive with email. S/He should be the most understanding and the most interested on me being as productive as possible.
Of course, not all circumstances are the same, so this is just general advice. There is no such thing as a "best practice" that applies to each and every situation.
Regarding your question about email rules, I think you have a business or open source idea there. :)
Thanks again!
Dan