# batch: send emails in the mornings

rube goldberg machines are machines that solve very simple problems in an overcomplicated manner. it's quite satisfying to start them: once you start them, you can just sit back and relax. the task is now outside of your control. it might break, it might succeed, but for now you just need to wait and see.

whenever i send a document or commit for review, or i just send an email with questions to someone, i get a similar feeling. while i didn't fully accomplish my task yet, the task itself is now outside of my control so i don't need to worry about it for a little while. it's all on other people. it's a very stoic approach to task management.

the problem at work is that there's always a lot more tasks to do. so it's very hard to get to the "sit back and relax" state. so here's an idea: don't send out your artifacts immediately!

keep working at stuff: prepare docs, commits, email drafts, but hold on to them. only send them out in the morning right after you are done with your morning routine or are interrupted otherwise. this will accomplish four things:

• in the morning you have an easy task to do: send out stuff. this means you start out the day productive and that feeling motivates you to do more thorough the day.
• if you managed to accumulate multiple artifacts the previous day(s) that you can now send out together, then you are now pretty much progressing on multiple tasks simultaneously without you making any sweat. and there's less guilt about not progressing at all whenever you make a break.
• you protect yourself from the expensive context switches. sometimes a response comes in that you could handle in a few minutes. but this breaks your flow and in reality costs you a lot more. if you can't respond today anyways, you won't feel a pressure to drop everything to respond right now.
• sometimes other people make you angry and you write an angry response. by the next morning you have calmed down and you won't send the angry response at all. this way you prevented making some of your relationships worse.

of course there's lot of nuance to how to do this without being annoying to others. in general you would only do this with your tasks and you wouldn't unreasonably slow down the progression of other people's tasks.

i don't really follow such a practice myself yet, only sometimes: e.g. when i suddenly get inspired on a weekend and feel like working. i might solve a few tasks but i don't send them out for review on the weekend. i send them out the next monday. i always felt good on such mondays and that's what i'm trying to generalize. i guess i'll experiment a bit and see.

published on 2021-06-03

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