My book, Rule the Web: How To Do Anything and Everything on the Internet — Better, Faster, Easier, is officially available in stores and online. In addition to running a blog about cool Web-based productivity tricks, I'm also hosting a live call-in show on BlogTalkRadio. Last week I interviewed Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 4pm Pacific time) I'll be interviewing Good Experience founder Mark Hurst about his new, excellent book, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload.
I expect Mark and I will be talking a lot about handling email overload. Mark's book lays out a plan for managing inboxes that are bursting at the seams.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to Merlin Mann of 43 Folders entry about "the strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy," which is Lawrence Lessig's last-resort method for getting out from under thousands of emails waiting for replies.
Mark read the post and emailed the following to me:
sorry, but i feel compelled to write you about this… merlin is a good
guy, and larry lessig is a good guy, but they are sadly out-of-step on
this point.there's no excuse for e-mail overload – there's a simple solution –
people can choose not to practice it, if they want, but at least they
should stop advancing counterproductive ideas like e-mail bankruptcy.
people can read "Bit Literacy" in a few hours and be done with this
problem forever.
If you're curious about Mark's email method and other productivity tips and techniques, visit BlogTalkRadio at 4pm Pacific Time and call us at (646) 915-8698.
P.S. Merlin Mann is my guest on July 18, so I'll give him a chance to explain his method for working through his daily gusher of email. (I suspect their methods are very similar, actually.)
