Inbox tolerance value

I have zero inbox tolerance (IT).

Every email drops through spam filter will be consumed immediately. Email processing always has been top priority thread in my daily task scheduling. Yes, my system works pretty well by interrupt handling, be it an engineer or manager schedule; I also have the bottom half handling to allow interrupt pre-empt if you're a Linux geek and really interested.

Secondly, I never group emails into sub folders, categories or any kind. It's simply a waste of time and counter-productive. You have From (who raised the matter), To (who should care), Subject (what's the matter), what else do you need to bring it out more easily? Whenever I saw a ever growing tree of folder structure, I am thinking "who are we kidding here, are you really gonna efficiently penetrate through this depth and get what you want from some emails you don't even remember whether or not you have consumed". I bet by the time you actually got the email, if you're lucky, there is a big chance you've forgot what's for, and all the reasons why it matters.

Also, just for the record, I never bought the excuse that 'I am too busy to check my emails', 'I have actual work to do to be interrupted'. While we're so comfortably making these alibi for us to
shy into our own little geek caves, away from brute truth - communication is what really make or break.

What I should have provided is the definition of email consumption. Based on the From, To, Subject (surprisingly, little credit is given to priority field, due to the obvious abuse), every email is processed with either immediate response, noted, ignored, fyi'ed. (You might have picked up, yes, I never deleted emails.)

What's your IT value (number of unread/number of emails in inbox, per day)? Why is that?

Leave shit to where it belongs

Nowadays, there are tons of blogs, books, tips about how to get things done and why it's important to do so.

What I want to talk about however, it's how to leave shit to where it belongs, and why so. This is assuming you're a self sufficient and proactive cell. At certain point in time, you find yourself couldn't let go any screaming customer emails or plan of attack to any critical issues. Instead, you find yourself repeatedly coming back and dip into every project meeting, on every email thread of all issue discussion, being the one cooking the plan involves parties others don't even know they exist in the organization. In short, you're rock'n'roll, you are kicking ass.

Maybe or may not be, some part of you feels bored and tired of repeating this exercise and you just know that you can do a good job as this is what you do, what you grew up from. But, your team doesn't really appreciate what you have been doing, of course your hard working and attention to details have always been very convincing, however, they didn't learn much. At the end of last project, they are just identical to what they were. Why? Because you didn't leave shit
to where it belongs.

I know you don't like not being the centre of the gravity, I know you also hate 'not-in-the-loop' for everything, maybe you still hold sense of insecurity for not being able to review code from every part of the system, or you just couldn't understand how maker's schedule runs outside immediate firing line. All these share one reason, you don't know how to leave shit to where it belongs.

What you will probably realise is, there will not be void in a positive team environment, to which hopefully you're part of it. To give'em space and leave people chew and grow on their responsibility might just be what you need to really inject sense of ownership into this team, you being there or not.

So, leave the shit to where it belongs. No one likes when shit hits the fan. Nonetheless, you need the shit spin out from the fan to test your defensive system, more importantly, how well your system performs under negative impact. Let go of the shit so you could have a chance to take care of something which might present real challenges, such as fan is broken.