tough cookie
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005so i’m trying to whittle away at my work email inbox, which i have been managing with labels and not really filing as a sort of experiment, but now there are over 1500 messages in it, and some have just got to go. i figure if i just spend 20 minutes or so at a time i will conquer it eventually.
anyway this is interesting for other reasons because i’m thinking a lot about email categorization for my capstone.
so i just found this message that is an autoreply that says : “sorry, i don’t work in the bursar’s office anymore. please write someone else from now on.”
what is the best way to handle a message like that?
a lot of my job is actually about remembering who to contact about different things, and the “right” person changes all the time, so this isn’t that rare. but i’m thinking “where can this go where i would actually see it when it is relevant?” the way it usually goes is i remember some conversation i had with someone and figure that’s the person i should talk to, so i search for things about that conversation until i find the person, and i write them. but i don’t always find ALL of the messages from that person, so the odds that i’m going to find this one, telling me to write someone else, are slim. in fact, since i got that message, i Have written this person about something else, but i only just realized it now, and that’s because my inbox is so frickin full that they show up next to each other when i sort by sender. if i had filed the other message away somewhere based on what it was about, rather than who it was from, that couldn’t happen, and even if it could, it makes no sense to think that i would scan All the messages from Every person just in case there’s something like this there.
so what if i was able to attach a note to the address itself? something so that, if i tried to type it again, it gave me a little warning? that could be useful for other kinds of messages, too – i wish i could attach all messages with contact info to the address of the person, so that if i’m wondering what their latest address or their id number is i could just look to see if any of those sorts of messages are attached to the name rather than scouring for them in contact info dumping grounds or gambling on whether i updated the info somewhere else.
that would be great.
but would a better solution to this particular problem be to use more aliases for official stuff like this? i’ve often thought of a scheme wherein iu maintains some kind of central lookup for employees that matches common questions to aliases and then you just always write to that alias no matter who has the job. they have things like bursar@indiana.edu and imuhotel@indiana.edu, but you still end up talking to more specific people most of the time and then that person gets email forever from everyone who ever talked to them, even if they change jobs. or maybe you could make your own aliases, like guytoaskaboutjohn’scontract@indiana.edu, and you would only have to tell it once.
dunno.
there are three real problems here, i guess – the job shifting problem, the not knowing who to ask problem, and then the classification problem that originally got me thinking – how should we handle it when a message isn’t really related to another collection of messages, but to an address?
or a date?
would that be the same?
i’ve struggled with how to file things that were something like “look at me again next thursday”, and that could be addressed by being able to attach the email to the date
or you could just use jminder for that one, i guess (you can pay me royalties, later, josh ;)
so whatever, just thinkin aloud
the question i’m left with is something like: if there are a lot of ways to approach a problem, how do you know which are bandaids and which are getting at the root of the matter? if bandaids are easy do they still have a place? can’t they point to the root in ways that trying to dig it out by just puzzling about it can’t? is there a rule to help tell when they are doing that vs. when they are just holding something together that really should be sold for scrap and started anew?