The Butt Ugly Weblog

One way to manage your email overload...

...is to simply make it someone else's problem. Here's the Out Of Office -message from a colleague:

Thank-you for your recent email.

Your message has been deleted from ~CutBoy's inbox, and all trace of it removed from our server. He has no way of knowing the message even existed.

So, if you still think that he will find the contents of your mail important you are welcome to re-mail at a future date at your convienience.

Sincerely,

Mail assistant to CB

I love it - resending the email when you even don't know when the person is back causes a significant cognitive load to the person sending it. Therefore, only the really important messages will be resent, and thus, the problem of filtering out the good email from the bad is distributed to the senders. Whee, practical applications of distributed computing using human brains :-)