Sharing the Productivity-Geek Love: Don’t Be An Email/Voicemail Black Hole

It’s no secret to my friends that I’m a productivity nerd, meaning I like to think about productivity and productivity systems (not that I’m necessarily a very productive person). So, on the occasion of my 30th birthday last year, my friends blessed me with a book filled with their own thoughts and observations on how to get things done.

Needless to say, I was really moved by this gift, and the contributors to that book probably don’t know that I read all of their entries and that I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from them. Some of them are literally productivity tips, while others are inspiring quotes or philosophical musings.

So as my 31st birthday quickly approaches, I think I’ll share the wisdom and inspiration of my friends with everyone, in the hopes that their thoughtful gift can bring a little bit more productivity and and inspiration to others. I’m not going to disclose full names – please don’t take that to mean that I’m not trying to give credit where credit is due. I made a choice to start writing this online journal, but not everyone has made that choice, so I don’t want to inadvertently give anyone any kind of web presence they’d rather not have.

Here’s the first entry, from someone I’ll just call “D”. D is someone who can, without question, get things done, and as far as I know, she does it all without any new-fangled system that she read about in some book written by a professional consultant, so she gets major respect for her innate productivity kung-fu.

here are my top ten tips:

10. Don’t make commitments unless you know you can do it for real.
9. build other people’s capacity by delegating stuff
8. file. everything.
7. follow up.
6. pound out email before breakfast. (wake and type)
5. talk less, think more.
4. think less, do more. (this one may just apply to me)
3. sleep less
2. sleep more
1. train yourself to be disciplined in your work and the way you live your life

True words of wisdom. I don’t know if I can follow number 6; I get pretty damned hungry in the morning, especially after a morning run, and it would be tough to maintain focus. However, I do appreciate the sentiment behind it. I think many of the emails we don’t write or that we put off are actually very simple and quick 2 minute action items that we procrastinate on because we have some emotional resistance to dealing with it, whether it’s unpleasant feelings associated with the subject or the sender or guilt for not having responded already, or guilt for not having taken care of something that the email references or inquires about. So this tip is really about picking a consistent time every day to focus purely on the act of banging out those necessary emails, no matter how unpleasant or guilt-ridden the experience may be. Responding to email is kind of like brushing your teeth or bathing/showering regularly – you just gotta do it. And if you don’t at some point, the people around you will probably start to edge away. And if that happens, it becomes harder and harder to be productive (and effective), especially if being productive and effective in your life requires working with others.

In the world we live in now, we don’t have the luxury of not being responsive to emails – not if we want to maintain our integrity in the eyes of others. Nothing is more frustrating than sending an email to which a response is required and not getting one – I’ve definitely been guilty of burying particular emails or not responding in a timely way and my relationships with friends, colleagues and clients have suffered for it.

So every day I try to remind myself not to be an email black hole [all of this equally applies to voicemail]. Sometimes I fail, and some emails still slip through the cracks, but for the most part, I’m much better about it than I used to be, and I’m always striving to achieve a 100% response rate. I know it’s achievable, and it really shouldn’t be that hard – it’s really just about discipline (see number 1 above).

Thanks, D!

My Life Post-Treo – First BlackBerry Impressions

I made the switch from a Treo 650 to a BlackBerry Pearl this week. So far, my suspicions have proven to be true: the BlackBerry is a much more functional communications device than the Treo, but the Treo is more flexible in how it does things, and has a lot more software available to it.

What I Like About the BlackBerry

• Email and web access is solid, stable and intuitive. My Treo was always crashing when I was trying to use it as an email device or surf the web.
• The device itself is super small and light. It’s so light and small, I’d even consider taking it on runs with me. The Treo is a brick compared to this thing. Now if only I could find a good running log for the BlackBerry…
• Battery life is great compared to the Treo.
• I use BlackBerry Enterprise Server with a hosted Microsoft Exchange service, so basically my setup is the same as the set up most big corporations that deploy BlackBerries use. This means that all my calendars, todos, contacts and notes are synchronized wirelessly and regularly, without me having to initiate the sync process.

What I miss about the Treo

• A nice selection of third-party programs, like a good journaling application with a desktop component, a good eBook reader with a much better selection of books, a handheld version of Quicken that synced seamlessly, a good running log… the list is endless
• My implementation of Getting Things Done seemed to flow much better on the Treo, but maybe that’s just a function of how new the user interface of the BlackBerry is to me. The basic PIM apps on the BlackBerry (calendar, todo list, notes, contacts) have always seemed to be somewhat of an afterthought, and are much less polished than the Palm offering, not to mention all the third party PIMs available for Palm devices. On the BlackBerry, there’s almost nothing available except what comes on the BlackBerry.
• In general, I find that I have to work around the limitations of the BlackBerry operating system and software, whereas Treo software generally was much more customizable and flexible.
• One email minor hiccup: I have this borderline-OCD thing about having a complete record of all my emails received and sent. On the Treo, I could set my email client of choice, Chattermail, to automatically blind carbon copy (bcc:) an email address I have set up as a receptacle for all the emails I send. On the BlackBerry, there is an inexplicable lack of an option to automatically bcc a particular email address on every email I send, so I have to remember to manually enter my sent-mail address in the bcc field when I send an email from the BlackBerry.

All in all, I’m pretty happy so far. I’m much more connected with the BlackBerry, and reliable mobile email access is great. Hopefully it won’t become an addiction as it seems to have become for so many.

Ubiquitous Notetaking on the Treo and the Blackberry

For anyone who has a Blackberry, or is thinking about switching to a Blackberry, I thought I’d share a recent discovery that convinced me to switch from my Palm Treo 650 to a Blackberry: ideaMatrix.

First a little background: I’ve been a Palm user since 2000. The Palm operating system was great for what I needed: a reliable calendar and contacts manager – and the games and other entertaining aspects of it didn’t hurt either. But, since I launched my law practice, I’m finding that I need more reliable mobile access to my email, and the problem I’m having with the Treo is that it’s constantly restarting or locking up.

So I recently I started thinking about switching to a Blackberry, but one thing was keeping me on the Treo: I’ve been using a journaling application called Daynotez as an all-purpose note-taking database. In fact, it’s quite possibly the most used app I have on the Treo. The great thing about Daynotez is that on the Treo, you just launch the app and start typing and it creates a new note entry that is date- and time-stamped. I use the companion desktop app practically every day at work. It’s perfect for transcribing voicemail messages, taking notes during calls with clients, writing down important info when I’m on the phone with customer service reps, and just jotting down random information like phone numbers and stuff that I might want to use again later. I rarely lose any information, because it’s all in there (if I remember to put it in there), and searching for a particular entry is quick. For any Getting Things Done users, it’s basically my Ubiquitous Capture Tool. (For anyone who is still using a Treo, I highly recommend Daynotez, if you couldn’t tell already.)

So the thought of switching to a Blackberry and losing one of the most useful tools I have that keeps me sane really had me reconsidering. But after some diligent searching, I found ideaMatrix for the Blackberry, which looks to be a really excellent note-taking and information-organizing tool. It doesn’t have a desktop companion (which would make it perfect) but it does have what some might consider to be a better alternative: it synchronizes over-the-air to a server, where your notes database is accessible via a web-based client. Now that web-based software (like Google Apps) seem to be taking over, I suppose this may be better than only being able to access my notes from a single computer that has the desktop software installed. My only concern is not having keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are very important to me.

So the switch to the Blackberry is imminent. I’ll post any other discoveries that might be useful once I actually start using the new smart phone.

a quick aside on ubiquitous capture…

If you’ve bothered to read this far, I applaud your determination. (Bear with me, I’m a relative noob to blogging and brevity is not one of my strengths, but I’m working on it.) I also wanted to mention quickly the benefits of having a tool like Daynotez or Ideamatrix or a mini-notepad or even just a bunch of notecards clipped together with you all the time to jot down random thoughts and bits of information. Anyone who has read Getting Things Done by David Allen knows that one of the things he emphasizes is getting all the random thoughts out of your head, into a system that you trust you’ll come back to later, so that you don’t stress out about potentially forgetting things. This allows you to reach a state of mental clarity and focus on the task at hand. Some people already do this without having to read a book about it or spend countless hours reinforcing the habit. But for the rest of us who have at various times been really scattered, frazzled, overwhelmed by trying to keep everything in our heads, give it a try. For one week, try carrying around a notebook, or notecards, or anything that you can find to jot down any random thought in your head. Try not to hold anything in your head. At the end of each day, take all those thoughts and put them into whatever task-management system you have, and see if you don’t maybe feel a little more in control and less like there might be some random commitment or task lurking in your brain somewhere that you’ve forgotten. When it works, it’s like magic.