Denis McDonough Quotes

I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.

I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.

Basically, when I get home I just do emails for around three hours, which stinks. I have a thing about getting into your inbox every night before going to bed. I'm usually working from my laptop or my phone, desperately trying to get my inbox to zero before I fall asleep.

We're at the point now where the challenge isn't how to communicate effectively with e-mail; it's ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most.

I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I'm trying to be more mindful of that.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

I am a great believer in the OHIO principle: Only handle it once. When you read an e-mail, decide whether or not to reply to it, and, if you need to reply, do so right then and there. I have found that about 80 percent of all e-mails, whether internal or external, do not require a response.

The calmer and more well-ordered my desktop is, the more I can convince myself I'm on top of things.

I save everything up until Sunday night because if I start sending emails on Saturday afternoon, then people have to start responding to me on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is Rescue Time. It runs in the corner of my computer and tracks how much time I spend on different things. I realized that even though I was doing e-mail only a couple of minutes at a time, it was adding up to a couple of hours a day. So I'm trying to reduce that.

Getting paperwork under control makes me feel more in control of my life generally.

I'm having a good time. Managing my things takes a lot of time.

The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.

From a productivity perspective, prioritization is key. And it's very easy to focus on clearing the decks of minutia, especially when one's very busy.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

I learned, even when all hell is breaking loose, first to take time to make my environment productive.

Email is here to stay - it's time we got better at using it.

I am methodical about my email inbox, and I always have a physical to-do list. Without those two things, I think I'd lose my mind.

It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.

Slowing down doesn't mean accomplishing less; it means cutting out counterproductive distractions and the perception of being rushed.

I do everything via email. Which in turn works as my tickler file and prioritization queue. I start at the top every morning and keep on going until I'm finished. I don't do calls. I don't do meetings.

If people would reflect that one can only do one thing at a time and therefore there is never more than one thing to do at a time, there would be less fatigue in the world.