A frequent complaint these days is the feeling of being overwhelmed with information: We're getting hundreds of emails, dozens of voice mails, dozens of phone calls, post it notes, feed updates, correspondence, thousands of bookmarks and sites we've visited that we know had good infromation but we just can't find them again, pamphlets and brochures, and it goes on and on.

It gets to the point that it seems like an unmanagable, overwhelming mess.

Often it isn't the tools or the medium, but rather the way that we use it, that causes the problem. Email in particular is frequently misused, and gets maligned for being a productivity waste when it's really flawed usage that's the problem. As such, here's a couple of email tips from an avowed email lover.

1. Give a concise, but detailed, subject line that accurately conveys exactly what the message is about. This is a huge issue with email, with many apparently hoping to add a note of suspense to their emails by giving vague or misleading subject lines (e.g. "Notes" or "Ideas" or "Feedback" or "Hrmmmm", instead of "SQL Server Presentation Summary Notes" or "New Product Ideas for Mobile Battery Market" or "Comments regarding Q1 2006 Finance Summary"). You should customize reply subject lines as well, adding specific suffixes if your reply deals with particulars (e.g. "RE: Lunch Party - Drink Menu" if you're replying in specific about the drink menu"). Any email client worth its weight in electrons threads emails by a hidden message ID, so you shouldn't worry about fragmentation.
   
   Your subject line should be a critical piece of the communication, allowing the recipient to determine how to fit in their communications flow.
   
   
2. Provide an "executive summary" for longer emails, comprised of 10 or less sentences. It should accurately be a subset of the larger message, minus technical details or discussion points that might not be applicable for all recipients. Everyone appreciates such summaries, and it can help fend off the anti-email crusaders who discourage email to avoid the responsibility of reading them.
   

These practices primarily benefit the recipients of your missives, however they do benefit you as well. You'll have better organization of your sent items, for instance, not to mention that in the future you will go through your emails, amazed that you were the author, trying to quickly figure out what each of them was about in the search for something in particular.

On the theme of efficient communications, I caught a post a few days back where the author detailed how they categorize their RSS feeds into the "20% that matter" and the "80% that don't". This perplexed me, because if 80% don't matter, then why subscribe to them in the first place? Is it some sort of "junk collection" of the internet kind, where there's a feeling of accomplishment having more and more irrelevant information pouring in every day?

Personally I don't use an RSS reader, and I subscribe to no one -- I don't need to know every random thought that goes through Robert Scoble's mind (personally I think most of his entries are noise, which is how I feel about most frequently updated blogs. There's no way I want a little feed icon blinking every time some three line snippet pours out), and even worthwhile writers like Joel Spolsky or Seth Godin don't demand immediate attention. Instead, every couple of days, or for some months, I browse around to all of the sites that I'm a fan of, quickly scanning past all of the floatsam for something worth reading.

This isn't to say that feed readers are bad: Like everything else it's the usage that really matters. Yet if people really, truly think that anxiously watching countless blogs is critical to their industry or technical knowledge, they're focused on entirely the wrong thing (unless they're in the blog industry and they rely upon commenting on other people's comments).

Speaking of being focused on the wrong thing, while doing my bi-weekly dive through the sites, I caught a post by the esteemed Erik Sink - WPF for Laggards - where he discussed WPF - Windows Presentation Foundation. Going through various names and feature lists over the years, this is a new way of developing for the Windows platform, and it will change how a lot of us build software. Is it important to know, however (e.g. are Windows developers not up on WPF "laggards"?). Of course it isn't, and in many ways details of it are just communications noise that distracts people from the incredible amount of knowledge they need to do their job today.

When WPF is realized, eventually, sometime next year, and as it finally makes its way into the tools that we use, it'll be worth paying attention to it. Otherwise there is little or no advantage -- though often there's a signficant time and focus cost -- to jump on the bandwagon before its time.