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Cognitive overhead of email

Looks like these days bitching about email is my favourite topic. What can I do no matter what I do I just cant keep up with email flow.  The new kind of emails just keep increasing, I was doing a good job 2 years ago and close to inbox zero daily and was writing a lot of code but two things have increased the email flow to me recently:

  1. Internal reports about production montioring from Newrelic, haproxy, exception analysis by team. 
  2. Review requests.  This is a recent one. Most review requests are sent to Java review group and somehow I atleast need to spend 1-2 min on every email to first decide whether this is for me or not.  Even if there are 30 review request per day it consumes 30 min of my time just to make sense of it. Daily when I see 100 emails to be answered I feel disheartened that I cant write any code today.  
 Both above items are necessary evil, #1 has increased production stability so my weekends are less busy.  #2 I am hoping eventually will increase code quality and lead to more ownership and processes that would lead to a self correcting system  requiring less involvement from leads.

But I need to do a better job or come up with some other way to do this. Its almost 5:00  and I had two 1 hour meetings, 1 Elastic search node down that consumed 1.5 hours and 2 team calls 30 min each. And I cleared some 60 emails. The only code I wrote is removing some junk code as it was causing some exception when a penetration tester was testing that flow.

Feeling frustrated as need to do something about this.  This Slack killing email sounds interesting.

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