Post #1663429

2026-04-25 13:45 UTC

Around 2000, when #PuTTY first started to become popular, it brought me more and more email. At some point it became hard to answer it all, and my inbox started to grow. Young and optimistic, I came up with a plan to fix this. I drew a line in my inbox (by sending myself an email with subject "---------"), and told myself that I'd keep the region below the line clear, and every few days, deal with a few messages from above the line, until eventually the line was at the top again. Of course, it didn't work at all. Soon enough there was a huge backlog even below the line, and the stuff above the line was all still there. The line became part of the problem, not the solution. It took a historian friend of mine to point out the fallacy. To answer more mail, you must spend more time answering mail. No amount of classifying, rearranging, or reorganising it makes there be less of it. You must either answer the mail or decide not to. (And once there's too much of it, only one of *those* is possible.) This is a post about management methods that respond to any problem by spending more rather than less time moving issues around the bug tracker or kanban board or what have you.

Replies (14)

@poleguy@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 13:49

@simontatham Is there also a useful analogy in the story of how you eventually dealt with your email problem?

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@Photo55@mastodon.social 2026-04-25 13:50

@simontatham the NHS was prone to that being inflicted on clinicians.

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@bit101@mstdn.social 2026-04-25 13:53

@simontatham this is a good insight, and well written. I've tried just about every todo list and task management system out there. They mostly fail for me when the the undone items pile up and I don't want to look at the system anymore. It's great fun to organize and tag and prioritize and categorize tasks into projects and assign contexts, etc. etc. But at some point you gotta do stuff.

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@mjd@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-25 14:06

The incentives are wrong. Management is paid to manage, not to do tasks. If they don't hold meetings and move stuff around on the board, they're not doing their job. And to whatever extent they solve the underlying problem, they only succeed in making themselves superfluous.

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@UpLateGeek@bitbang.social 2026-04-25 15:28

@simontatham the thing I found that most improved the amount of email I could get through was learning the keyboard shortcut for archiving emails.

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@drahardja@sfba.social 2026-04-25 16:02

@simontatham Tangentially related https://humancode.us/2024/10/05/the-proof-of-passion

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@uriel@x.keinpfusch.net 2026-04-25 16:21

@simontatham you could have used thunderbird, and defined retention rates per folder. So that, "keep the last 50" would happen automagically, and this would have given you peace of mind....

Open ##2115647
@jukkan@mstdn.social 2026-04-25 16:45

@simontatham The more mail you answer, the more mail you get. The lesson is... Anyway, I saw the below quote 10+ years ago and created my own motivational poster out of it, to look at whenever I felt I was sinking into my inbox. It helped put things into perspective. #inbox

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@mdione@en.osm.town 2026-04-25 17:48

@simontatham my boss does issue amnesty and closes very old ones.

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@mancavgeek@social.teamb.space 2026-04-25 18:02

@simontatham On a semi-related note, there is an episode of the classic British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf where one character, Timmer, has a few weeks to prepare for the officers exam, and sets about the perfect revision timetable, to learn everything in perfect, biteize chunks. And he spends so long making it perfect, with everything colour-coded, and his pens laid out just so, that he ends up realising its the night before the exam and he hasn't started, you know, revising... So he pulls an all-nighter, with lots of stimulants, then has a mental breakdown as soon as he enters thecexam room, and fills the exam paper with the phrase "I am a fish" over, and over, and over...

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@flippac@types.pl 2026-04-25 18:18

@simontatham Management methods can speed things up by cutting latency rather than work (this is exactly what the original kanban did!), if it unblocks someone. But variants on queueing theory sure crop up a lot...

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@march38@mstdn.social 2026-04-25 23:18

@simontatham most trackers have a "Wontfix" substate when closing. It shouldn't be a substate. The "Closed" state is ambiguous and should disappear, split in two: "Wontfix" and "Done". I've seen countless, time-consuming debates about this surprisingly simple yet enduring ambiguity. Time management is a little bit about what to do and a lot more about what NOT to do. The latter is the harder part yet most systems focus on the former.

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@mlanger@mastodon.world 2026-04-26 11:59

@simontatham @rpmik My inbox sits at more than 1500 messages. I tried saying I'd deal with 100 messages a day to get down to Inbox Zero, but never followed through. It's gotten to the point that I don't even bother READING my email daily. I hate email.

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@jhaas@a2mi.social 2026-04-26 17:02

@simontatham A bit of white-hair wisdom I share with jr. developers comes from queueing theory: If your rate of accomplishing work is less than or equal to the rate of incoming work to do, you effectively have infinite work. The only thing you can do is prioritize, and drop some of it. The advice is for engineering systems, but it's applicable to every single other thing they have to deal with... including management.

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