The Inbox
Years ago, when I came out of the bank training program I attended after Business School, I remember talking to a young British colleague who explained the experience he was having on the line for the first time. He was assigned to the Latin America Department and was the junior member on the Brazil Desk. That’s what we used to call coverage of s specified region or country, the _______ Desk. His comment about the experience was that he wished the training program had done a better job of preparing him to “fly a desk.” That was his way of explaining that dealing with the constant flow of the inbox was challenging. In those days, of course, it was almost all physical paper flow. But the notion of handling a set of issues on a reactive basis can be very taxing and complicated if lots of problems confront you all at once. Knowing how to handle the flow takes a certain skill and experience.
I remember once handing off a big managerial job to a junior associate who was quite confident and somewhat arrogant. He had done a great job handling a specialized team and wanted the big job quite anxiously. I gave it to him and was nearby in my new and even bigger job (he still worked for me, but did so on the larger platform that I had recently run). In a matter of weeks, he came to me pleading for help. The inbox flow was killing him, and he didn’t know how to handle it all. An inbox can do that to you.
Nowadays, inboxes are largely symbolic and yet they still exist in digital form. Our email or text inboxes are just as intimidating as the old paper ones if you don’t follow basic rules of triage. Those are not complicated rules, but they are a function of discipline. First of all, you have to decide if you are going to file things away and use the hoarder approach of tossing or saving. Digital inboxes have the advantage of differentiating what has been read and what has not. The problem with that is that if you don’t file (or better said, dispose of) a message, you can lose track of things you’ve read and simply allowed to drift down the pecking order. Important messages that need attention can easily get lost in that shuffle. It takes a certain discipline to dispose of issues as soon as you read them.
I am reminded of a sad story involving the infamous PanAm 103 flight disaster that went down due to terrorism over Lockerbie, Scotland. My Division lost a colleague who was on that flight. We also lost the daily bank pouch that would be flown every day on that flight from Heathrow to JFK to get important mail to us quickly. We mourned the loss of our colleague, and then about six months later we had delivered to us package of recovered materials from the pouch. You may remember the scenes of this disaster with debris scattered over the muddy fields of Lockerbie. Part of that debris, besides parts of our friends and loved ones, were the contents of the pouch. The recovery teams in these disasters are very careful to gather and sort everything. They somehow managed to gather and recognize the pouch contents. Each piece was placed in a plastic bag with whatever grass and mud might be clinging to it.
The amazing lesson was in the priorities of life. In six months, these “critically important” documents were meaningless to us other than as a reminder of the horror inflicted on our colleague. It was an eye-opening lesson about life priorities and about how to handle urgent inbox clutter.
I also recall an early lesson from a misguided man I was assigned to my first summer in the bank. Once, while sitting in his guest chair to learn what a lending officer did (he happened to be on the German Desk), he picked up a letter from a client that was on the top of his inbox. He read the German fluently (I had not a clue what he was saying) and then promptly crumbled the letter and threw it in the waste basket. I asked, and he explained, that it was a client letter asking for certain errant debit to be corrected. He said with great confidence, “if it’s important, they will write again.” Not the best of lessons for me.
So, inboxes are not easy to triage. In general, I find that once opened and read, one must respond, file or delete. Deleting is a clear judgement that the matter is unimportant. Filing is a point of view that it may be important but does not need action. And replying, the most often course for all but junk mail, can be either a direct handling of the issue or a “volley to the deep backhand.” The volley is a stalling mechanism for something you either don’t want to handle or feel the other party should handle.
When someone interrupts me mid-inbox, I always excuse myself to finish the item I have open. If I don’t do that, there is a real risk that the item will get lost forever. I can’t ever be certain that lost items aren’t best lost (the Lockerbie effect), but I know I prefer the proactive handling of issues to the casting into the wind of issues to see where they go on their own.
I am not a private person and don’t care who looks at my inbox or phone. What they are likely to see is somewhere between 0-50 messages that are unread. The number is usually closer to 0 than 50 since I tend to my inbox very regularly. I once looked at my wife’s phone and saw 750 unread messages. When I asked about it, she said they were likely junk messages. It would literally kill me to operate with so many unread messages out there, no matter what they were about. I would sooner cancel a junk email account than see a mounting number of unread messages.
I guess that all means that I am a process person that has learned to “fly a desk” over the years. Despite the lessons of Lockerbie, I am still and will always be obsessed with knowing what is being asked or expected of me in my inbox.