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Courtesy of Darwinmag.com, here’s seven ways to deal with email overload:

1. If any subject or issue involves more than two e-mails, one party should call the other to resolve the issue by phone.
2. No junk e-mail, no jokes.
3. Only send relevant information, which is defined as just what the person needs to know.
4. Limit CCs (which might be more appropriately named CYA).
5. Don’t ping-pong with e-mail for a conversation; use the phone.
6. Deal with it and delete it.
7. Don’t read every e-mail as it comes in; handle them in batches.

I’m not sure I necessarily agree with the first – sometimes email can actually be a more focussed and productive way of dealing with a tricky issue, although that does depend a lot on the verbosity and writing ability of the correspondents.

And in finest Blue Peter fashion, here’s some other ideas we prepared earlier…

Following on from a previous post of mine, Frank Patrick points out another reason why simple formulas have hidden dangers when it comes to calculating potential task durations:

When considering task estimates, we should simply face reality and recognize that estimates are best communicated in terms of ranges and best agreed to as such, and not as single point commitments. The idea of “accurate estimates,” over which too much time, effort, and angst is too often spent in project planning, needs to be set aside.

I’ve often thought that life would be easier (for project managers, at least) if we could get away with using the type of predictions that the Bank of England uses for monetary inflation (PDF link). The graphic is embedded in the PDF, unfortunately, but imagine a line graph where the end fans out into a range of possible values – the expanding ranges shaded by their probability, the darker the more likely (and closer to previous values).

This neatly illustrates both the potential range, and the potential likelihood, of the values. It eliminates the danger of focussing on a single value, but manages to convey the full range of possibilities. It’s an effective graphical way of saying, “there’s a 10% probability of X, but a 50% proability of Y”.

The problem with this approach is that Gantt charts don’t deal with probabilities – they deal with arbitaryly-selected values. And however much you caveat a Gantt chart with ranges and disclaimers, once you’ve produced a hard number, that’s the number that’s going to be quoted.

Here’s a long (and continually expanding) list of things you can do with RSS.

It’s a wiki page, so it can be expanded as more and more people have more and more idea – and naturally there’s an RSS feed.