Managing All the Work (advise me, please!)

In many ways I am very Old School.  I use a paper planner.  I keep physical notebooks.  I print PDFs and physically take notes on them.

But for work that involves others I have been pulled into dropbox (useful), google docs (useful for collaborative writing that involves more than one other human), and outlook** (because the university email).  I've toyed with Asana (was fun for one summer but I still prefer paper).  I've used scrivener (hasn't done anything for me that word docs don't).  Occasionally I learn something that is game changing (I didn't not know you could add PDFs to google forms, which solves so many of my problems!).

So I have a very specific question, and also a general one.  Specific:  for anyone who uses outlook, what are features you find valuable?    General:  are there other apps/platforms/technologies that you find helpful for work flow in general?  Happy New Year!  More words about that soon.




** since the university switched to outlook, over a stupid web based program, I find I have MORE problems organizing email and staying on top of email.  (My old system was very straight forward; anything marked unread I hadn't dealt with, and I kept my inbox down to the 25 messages I could see at a time).  I suspect there are easy solutions for this, but that means spending time playing with outlook to explore sorting, rules, etc.  I'd rather not take that time.  But I think 90% of my displeasure with work, seriously, has to do with email.

All the Email

I am on work email these days in the hour of 7:30-8:30 while I am also getting Tiny Boy ready for school.  He does math. I do email. He watches TV.  I do email.  Etc.  Several days this week I woke to a series of emails from my chair that he sent around 10 pm.  And then we began trading replies back and forth in these early morning hours.  He also has school-aged children.  I will say I was quite grateful that last night, as he sent the 5 pm Friday email, he also said he'd refrain from sending us email over the weekend, though we were free to reach out to him anytime (old colleague! new chair!).

I am not saying anything earth shattering. I am struck more and more by how much email=work. Organizing a visit for a guest writer? Email.  Reminding my students what they need to read for next week? Email. Revising the program website? Email. I could go on.  If email is not always itself the method of doing work, it is the method of communicating and disseminating the work. I can't think of an aspect of my job that does not entail some email.

So much of this email work is delegation or trading work back and forth.  I need a conference room reserved so I can check that off my list?  I ask our assistant (over email).  My chair needs us to read documents to contribute to our fall planning letter?  Yup, that's an email (with attachment!).

I'm even asked to do things over email that are not rightly mine to do.  (i.e. random high school kids emailing me for help with their book report)

I feel like for the most part I have reasonably good email habits.  (They could probably be better.  And I need to think seriously about how.)  But as I've been paying more attention to how I spend my time I am quite struck by how much of it is spent emailing.  Because most of my admin work involves email.  And this right here is why I absolutely refuse to accept student work over email (I've started using our course management system for some things but mostly still prefer paper)

How did faculty do work prior to 1994? (For  me, that was the beginning of email.  And graduate school.  For others it might have been slightly earlier or later.)

Anyway, if you have ANSWERS about how to deal with all the email, let's talk!