Acknowledgments

This ebook reflects many years of comparing notes with friends and productivity geeks, whose insights and inspiration have found their way into my workflow and this text. In particular, I want to thank Phillip Smith, Jodie Tonita, Troy Angrignon, Marnie Webb, Naunihal Singh, Rob Cottingham, Leda Dederich, and John Robinson for crucial conversations about email management and productivity. My colleague Sabino Marquez helpfully reviewed my Outlook tips to ensure they are accurate for Windows users. At hbr.org, Scott Berinato and Susy Jackson edited earlier pieces on email management that helped shape my thinking on this topic. Ania Wieckowski, at Harvard Business Review Press, who has edited this ebook series, has not only made me a better book writer but (much more challenging!) a better email writer.

I also want to thank the friends and colleagues who have served as guinea pigs for some of my email efforts over the years, even when it has involved waiting patiently for an email response when I’ve filtered their messages out of my inbox. Morgan Brayton was my right hand when I first moved to a filter-intensive approach to email, and her advice on how to fine-tune my filters—as well as her ability to catch what my filters missed—is what allowed me to stick with it. More recently, my colleagues at Vision Critical (especially Kelvin Claveria) have given me the gentle prompts that helped me adapt my mail management system to a corporate setting.

Most of all, I want to thank my mother, Deborah Hobson. She was the first person I knew who used email in her daily work life (all the way back in the eighties—go Mom!), and after convincing me that using email might be a useful skill, she gracefully suffered through the advent of the mom filter and even advised me on how to fine-tune it. Her speedy and consistent email responses set the high-water mark against which all other email correspondents are measured.