> You confidently redirect them to the proper channel. For example I often respond to chat messages that are not urgent with a simple “Thanks, please email this to me and I’ll take a look.”<p>Cut to me, in my house, flipping off your Slack message. Respond, or mark as unread, don't confidently ask me to do extra, completely redundant work for you.
Nice. I've landed on a very similar regime for myself that I've been calling Near-zero Inbox. Originally it was Inbox-Zero-by-EOW, with the goal of having my inbox empty by the end of the workday on Friday, I always end up with one or two items that I need to leave for action on Monday.<p>One technique that has gotten traction in my organization is the notion of "email bankruptcy" and "slack bankruptcy". I.e. if you find your email or slack debt getting too big to handle, you simply declare bankruptcy, archive everything (or everything older than a day or two), and start fresh. If you are very far behind, the downsides of doing this seem to be no worse than the alternatives.<p>When I shifted from IC engineering work to management I found that I gradually became overwhelmed with email and other comms from a lot of people who now either wanted my opinion or felt I needed to be informed about a lot of things I previously wouldn't have been involved in. Oddly, but maybe not surprisingly, I found that there was positive correlation between the size of my email backlog and how crowded my calendar was, and that the causality seemed to operate in a feedback loop. If I had too many meetings it got harder to keep up with email, and if I didn't answer emails, I got invited to more meetings. Practicing near-zero inbox actually gave me more time, instead of less.
"I have the luxury of an army of support staff to control the flow of information to me, for I am the peak of the information pyramid"<p>He has a sortof point which is you need to sift through the noise to get the signal. The issue is, and he's very much shielded from this, is that most places have a massive amount of noise, and its impossible to keep up.<p>If its my job to be the "decider" as he likes to be, and I am the top of the pyramid, then its trivial to be informed all the time.<p>If I have to do other things as well as this, then its hard.<p>At smaller companies I had an information network, which meant I was very well informed. I could, if I needed to, broker information.<p>At a large FAANG, and not living in the main country, that is impossible. You are reliant on third parties who you don't know personally.
"You feel well informed and rarely hear new information secondhand."<p>I am not sure I agree with the premise that I should not expect to hear information secondhand. I find it fairly effective to have a network of well connected individuals in the org who will ping me when there is new information I need to know about. We help each other stay more disconnected (and productive) by acting as information filters/forwarders. I allow these people to have interrupt privileges for me because I know if they are sending me a notification it has been vetted for urgency
Nah, no thanks. This is a losing battle. The "better" you are at email and the more responsive you are, the more email you'll get. Each prompt response sets a precedent, signaling your availability and encouraging more frequent communication. As your efficiency increases, so does the expectation for promptness, leading to an ever-growing volume of emails. Just opt out of staying on top of email and similar things.
Articles like this kill me. Surely the time you spent promoting the thing put you back into the hole, <i>if</i> the effort needs such ruthless optimization. I don't think it, or really most jobs, do.<p>Rather, things like this serve to aggrandize. We get the information to do work. It doesn't exist alone, there's another side/counterpart. These one-dimensional things are, well, limited.<p>If you're there to regurgitate information, it's a communication problem - not staffing. Well, kind of - but not in a way that's favorable to you. You're neither a producer or consumer, if hoarding is your primary focus<p>edit: CTO for Meta, lol. How high in the clouds.
"If someone sends me a chat that isn’t time sensitive, I redirect them to email"<p>I have a private Linear project, and I use the Linear-Slack integration to create issues from non-urgent chat messages. Being in Linear means I can track and label issues and link them it to related issues in public projects.<p>Of course, only if "Remind me in 3 hours" isn't good enough.<p>I do the same thing for GitHub mentions / PR requests: They automatically open a private Linear issue, and I triage them twice a day. I try to respond during the triage process if it's a short response and if not, put a due date for later. If someone needs an urgent response (rarely), then they can Slack me to get my immediate attention.
This all sounds great until you’re physically unable to work your system for an extended period of time (vacation out of cell range, illness, hospitalization, etc.). Then the pristine castle of information routing is buried under a pile of inputs and the only way out is inbox bankruptcy. If it’s important they’ll mention it again.
>> I am currently the CTO.<p>I am a sucker for super optimization. To not get sucked into these too much or take most of the points seriously I look at the role or situation they are in.<p>This is applicable for somebody in that situation.
Would like to remind of the context that this is Bosworth’s blog. Agrippa to the Augustus. Before trying to shame him, consider that he might have learnt his lessons the hard way.