Emails and productivity
7 Jan 2011
Towards the tag end of last year I was talking to someone about email and productivity, and he was describing his methodology and how he organised emails at work. It was interesting. We were tramping along a muddy canal bank at the time we had this conversation, so I couldn’t ask for a demonstration.
My acquaintance has a desktop folder for each project he is involved in, and wants to store the emails with the project files. So he:
- prints out the email
- scans it with his desktop scanner
- saves the scanned image as a pdf
- puts the pdf into the appropriate project folder
- is happy
I didn’t try to argue or explain or know better in any way; I just said “Oh, that’s really interesting and well organised” and we carried on down the canal path. I’ll say now that this is a man who is in his late thirties, is a qualified civil engineer, is reasonably competent, does his job well and is not noticeably maladjusted. And I am pretty sure that I did not misunderstand him in any way.
Truly amazing what people will do with technology.