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!

Why everyone needs a Gmail account (even if you don’t want to use it for email)

It’s come to my attention that there are a few people out there who don’t have, or don’t really use their Gmail accounts, which is kind of astounding to me considering how vastly superior (in my opinion at least) the Gmail interface is to every other web-mail offering I’ve seen. But beyond that, there are so many ways one can use a gmail account. How many, you ask? More than I can count, probably, but here are some ways that I use Gmail.

1. Online disk storage: These days, I rarely need to use a USB flash disk to transport files from one computer to another, because I can just email it to myself at my Gmail address. Why would I do this? Well I forget to bring my flash disk around with me sometimes. Also your Gmail account is protected with a password. How many of you out there can at the same about your flash disks? (Incidentally, if you DO want to protect your flash drive, you can encrypt your data, and I’m sure there are several password protection apps out there available for USB flash drives…). Also, you can’t physically lose a gmail account, but I know people who have lost several flash drives. Plus Gmail is 2GB of free storage while 2GB flash drives cost a pretty penny. Working on a computer that’s not connected to the internet? Well, fine, you still need a drive for that. But, honestly, how often does that happen? (Incidentally, Yahoo! recently announced that it was going to provide unlimited storage for Yahoo! Mail accounts, so in this regard, Yahoo! Mail edges out Gmail for pure storage.)

2. Email archive: [This idea came from Eric originally.] How often have you needed to refer back to one particular email, only to find that it’s buried in the 457 emails you allow to ferment in your inbox? Or maybe you do try to keep your emails organized by putting them into different folders… now did I put that email about the Project X in the Project X folder, or the John Smith folder? With Gmail’s search engine, finding that particular email is a easy as figuring out what search string to use. I usually just search for the person who sent it. No more digging around in folders or staring at a screenful of emails.

Many folks have email accounts that only allow for limited storage space. If you can poke around in your email settings and redirect (sometimes also called “forwarding,” but it’s different from the kind of forwarding you do when you pass an email on to someone else from within the email program) all of your email to Gmail, then you have an automatic backup of every email you ever received.

If you’re really ambitious, you can also try to have all the emails that you send from non-Gmail accounts also sent to Gmail account, so your Gmail account becomes a complete record of all your email correspondence. You can do this manually for every email you send simply by adding your Gmail address in the BCC field of any email you send. However, some email programs will allow you to set it up so that it will automatically do it for you (if you need help with this, let me know in the comments or contact me directly).

3. BlackBerry Lite: Don’t have a BlackBerry (or Treo), but you want to be able to check your email on your mobile phone? No problem! Scoff at Blackberry and Treo owners and their expensive gadgets by installing the Gmail Mobile application to your Java-enabled phone. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve played around with a non-smartphone phone, so I don’t know how prevalent phones with web browsers are, but I figure there a lot of people out there who don’t have CrackBerries or Treos or some other smartphone device who could benefit from this little tidbit.

I actually use the Gmail Mobile application on my BlackBerry, even though I receive all of my emails in the native BlackBerry messaging application. “Why?” you ask? See #2 above. It’s great. My entire email archive wherever I go.

* * *

Anyway, there are ton more uses for Gmail. I think I’ll save them for now. Many of them are kind of involved and really more for hard-core Gmail users. If you really want to explore some more advanced uses for Gmail, check out Steve Rubel’s article on how he uses Gmail as his Personal Nerve Center.

RSS Readers – Feed Me!

I’m not sure how many of you guys read a bunch of different blogs, newspapers, and other sites with regularly updated content, but if you’ve tried you know that you can spend a huge amount of time just checking the sites to see if they’ve been updated.

I just wanted to suggest that everyone use an RSS reader to aggregate all the different media sources you check, so that you can have all your content in one place, regularly updated, for easy reading. Conceptually, think of how you can subscribe to Podcasts in iTunes, only instead of audio (and now I guess video) content, you do it with text. It’s basically the same thing, and I think most aggregators also handle media files.

I personally use Google Reader to keep up with all the different blogs and news sites I try to follow. It saves me a ton of time. A lot of people like to use Bloglines. I believe Firefox even has an aggregator built into it, though I don’t use it. If you want one that isn’t web-based… well, there are just so many. I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is also a pretty good email client. There are ton of different RSS feed aggregators out there, and I haven’t really done much experimenting. Google Reader works for me, and it’s nice because I can access it at any online computer, just like my beloved Gmail. So, sniff around for a good reader that you like. Start subscribing to content, and see how much time you save if you’re already surfing around to several of the same sites regularly to check for updated news, sales, deals, gossip, reviews, essays… etc.

(Oh, and if it’s not too much trouble, subscribe to my blog, too. The feed link is at the bottom of the page.)

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.

Gmail Advanced Searching – Use It!

It’s quite possible that I’m just a little bit slow, but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to really try to start using the powerful search functionality in Gmail. One of the best things about Gmail, to me, is the fact that you don’t have to sort anything, ever. You can just archive it away and through the power of Google’s search engine, just search for whatever you need. But often, I want to see a specific email from somebody, but I don’t remember enough about the email to put more than the person’s name in the email the search field.

On my desktop I use Nelson Email Organizer, which groups all of my emails by date, or person who sent it, or by the label that I’ve applied to it. It basically works as a database that sits on top of my Outlook email database, and organizes my emails in ways that make it really easy to find the exact emails that I’m looking for.

Gmail can do almost exactly the same thing, and has the added benefit of being web-based so I can look up emails anywhere (even on my Treo).

So anyway, to cut to the chase, to find all the emails from a particular person, like me for example, all you need to do is type “from:tony” in the search bar, and Gmail will list all emails from anyone named tony or who has “tony” as part of their email address. I can’t tell you how much this has boosted my productivity – being able to locate emails quickly in this day and age, when emails are flyin’ back and forth constantly and the volume is only growing, has become a necessity.

For a complete list of Gmail advance search operators: Gmail Advance Search Operators