The 10%
A few nights ago I wrote about whether to archive your e-mails or not. While that discussion was really about ‘findability’, the actual question of archiving is really moot; that is, you are probably already archiving e-mail in some shape, form or fashion. Again, I dare say it, we are all e-mail packrats.
We keep everything - every little thing. From the mundane to the seemingly important, we keep it in the dire circumstance something may come back to bite us. So in a nutshell, it’s a C.Y.A. mentality folks.
To be nice about it, maybe we keep it for posterity - probably not. Well, maybe we keep it for some on-going projects or task items that we need to complete. But how to we manage our retention policy? How do we determine what goes and what stays.
There is some unique and personal algorithm that each of us executes to determine when, where, which, whether, and how each e-mail is or is not filed.
So this begs one question, “Have you ever lost anything in your e-mail folders you just knew you had kept?”
Here’s another, “When did that one e-mail you could produce as glowing evidence “C.Y.A.”?”
That’s “The 10%”… that elusive e-mail that escapes us even though we knew we filed it and that e-mail that was like a ray of sunshine from heaven above come to save us from certain doom.
Well if we only need 10%, can’t we just throw away the other 90% of e-mails we keep? I have 30,000 sent e-mails alone in my offline store “just in case”… With Outlook’s advanced search, what are the chances I am not going to type in the right phrase and miss what I was looking for (that’s sarcasm folks - and a rhetorical question)?
It’s that 10% of the time keeping us caught in the vicious cycle of saving everything, of amassing so much information it becomes useless. Quite literally it becomes too much information for us mere mortals to handle (see Information: Not Enough or Too Much?).
I would love to hear any tips or tricks any of you have found for managing the constant barrage of e-mails coming in, how to file them accurately, and which do you keep or throw away.
As the saying goes, it’s the 10% that drag the rest of us down.
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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