Sunday, November 26, 2006

Down With The Two Minute Rule: Scoble writes about the two minute email rule: I love this new two-minute rule for email from Eric Mack (delete all email that takes more than two minutes to answer)[...]. This two minute rule is the type of thing that makes me recoil in shock and give up hope for a sane future for my daughter. Shouldn't we be removing email that takes less than two minutes to answer? I feel that something that doesn't require attention to interact with is worthless - I'd rather spend my time engaged with concerns that require real thought! [...] What I think is really going on here is that for some reason email clients have never provided any real tools for content analysis and management - the market is actually wide open for some quite trivial new functionality (this is what happened with desktop search applications). (Via Data Mining). Some of us have been doing a bit of work on tools for helping manage email. Just a beginning. I totally agree that dropping any email that needs more than 2 minutes to respond is filtering all worthwhile thought from your exchanges, maybe from your day. What I would like is a convenient way to slow down email, especially the kind of email that doesn't need much thought. For example, I'd like an adaptive delay for my outgoing replies. If an outgoing reply is delayed by 8 hours, the reply to the reply will arrive tomorrow. Of course, some replies I want to go out right away. that's why intelligence and adaptation are needed for this purpose. 7:55:05 PM