One of the most challenging aspects of day to day work for most of us is keeping up with the flood of tasks and communications that come our way. There is email, phone calls, voice mail, coworkers ‘popping by’ and for some the added streams of instant messaging, RSS feeds and so on. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (among others) has a video of a presentation at Google about efficiently and effectively handling email:

The video is about an hour long, with the first 30 minutes or so of presentation and about 30 minutes of Q and A. I found it worth the time to listen audio only. The basic premise is that we need to manage our email more effectively, recognize that a lot of it can be handled quickly, and we need to just ‘process’ it. ‘Checking’ and ‘processing’ are different things, and Mann offers up some good suggestions on how to get through the email obligation and get more real work accomplished – key points: email in the inbox “means ‘this hasn’t blown up yet’” and “don’t use [email] as a to do list.” Who hasn’t just left an email in the inbox for a few hours (or days) because it is low priority? Mann suggests just getting it done – the situation isn’t going to go away, and will only become a fire. It is easier to prevent fires than put them out.