#OMNIFOCUS STUDENT HOW TO#
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'But what about all those emails from students?' This tweet in response to my original one was just a joke (it's a parody account): You still have to communicate well and have your act together or risk being professionally non-viable and failing in your primary task, which is to help students. This doesn't change based on the size of our workload or the terms of our employment. Still, though, we are all in the same situation: Communication is the underlying predicate of our work, and it's on us as professionals to stay on top of it. Contingent faculty can be particularly hard-hit with email not only in terms of volume but also because they may have to manage several email accounts. I get it that some faculty have vastly higher workloads, and proportionately larger email volumes, than others. 'But I can't do this because my situation is different': Yes you can and no it isn't.

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Note the 'P' there if it's not possible to respond right away, it's good practice to shoot the sender a quick email right away and say 'I got your email and I'm going to give you a full reply later today' or whatever your time frame demands. With truly actionable emails, respond ASAP. For me, this is only about 1/3 of the total volume of email I get, at most. Now you're down to the fraction of your emails that you really need to pay attention to. but NOT IN YOUR INBOX) and then pull it up later when it's needed. With this stuff, you do not reply but rather file it away (paper file, Evernote, OneNote, etc. This category can include meeting agendas, files, information from a student, and so on.

It's not junk but doesn't need a response.

In my experience, in a given day between 1/3 and 1/2 of what comes to my inbox is junk. This stuff you just delete on sight and don't look back. You know the type - stuff from mailing lists you didn't ask for, advertisements for shady conferences in Singapore, etc. When you look at an email that is in your inbox, ask yourself: What is it? There are three possible answers to this: But to apply it specifically to email, it works like this.

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How to process email: In this older post I wrote about a more general GTD framework for dealing with 'stuff', email and otherwise.

So let me offer some unsolicited and incomplete advice about what to do about this, and address some of the what-abouts pertaining to academic email. It's severely hampering your ability to do your job - anything in your job, including the stuff not pertaining to your emails, because each of those emails is occupying a small but nonzero amount of head space with you, and when you add it up, it draws attention away from everything. Whatever the situation, I stand behind my original message: If your email is so out of control that you cannot respond to students in a reasonably prompt manner (and I think a 2-day window is reasonable) then something needs to be done about it. And I've talked with faculty members who just don't care, who are even proud of their overflowing hoarder-like inbox as a badge of honor that somehow indicates their importance or the difficulty of their jobs. I've been approached by faculty members one-on-one where they confess that they have hundreds of emails in their inboxes and have no idea what to do about it. I've sat next to a colleague in a meeting and noticed the red badge on their Outlook icon says '527' on it.

I say this is more likely than the other scenarios because I've seen it myself more often. Or, specifically, the faculty has so many emails in their inbox that the students' messages are simply invisible because they are just two among 100, 500, even 1000+ emails sitting there in an inbox that is already overfull and continously aggregating more and more every minute, with nothing being done about it. However, if I'm being honest, it's more likely that the professor is simply ignoring this student. It's possible that the professor might simply be unable to reply - maybe they have the flu or are at a conference with terrible/non-existent wifi. The screenshot in the tweet is from a reddit post by a student. Namely, let's talk about email - and communication in general. #inboxzero /YaaqwMXLgK- Robert Talbert November 29, 2017 Profs: If your email inbox has so much in it that you can’t respond to students promptly, fix your inbox. I was going to post today with some more details on how I use GTD in reading research, but I decided after this tweet that I wanted to write about something different related to productivity:

Omnifocus student