Drowning in email? Don’t quit email, just use pay it forward email management

A long time ago I posted about PIFEM – its called Pay it forward because it will save your life, and after you learn how to use it, you need to tell someone else how to use it.

A massive part of my job is email, talking w/ engineers on many different campuses or dealing with our WW marketing teams; or 100% email when I work from Australia :)

The biggest email month I’ve had this year is February with 3800 out going emails.

Over at techmeme there is an interesting thread started by the New York Times article by Luis Suarez, I freed myself from e-mail’s grip.

Luis cut down the number of emails he sent by 80% in 1 week – if I tried this people would think I died or I’d have one hell of a next week.

When I was in Australia my wingman quit, leaving me cover the entire country for all enterprise SharePoint deals (for tech presales) I worked with a few colleagues in a similar situation and we invented PIFEM – read the docs over here.

I still get stuck in email holes like I had 450 untriaged on Friday afternoon and now i’m down to 268 – still a bad scene but much better than it could have been.

Download it here (btw – you need OneNote or a trial version to use it and Outlook 2007)