jpreardon.com » Productivity

Email Charter

jpreardon — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:00:28 +0000

It seems like very few people really love email. After all, if you use email in your professional life, you probably spend a good portion of your working day dealing with it. It’s been a few years since I was getting inundated with so many emails that I had to make changes to the way I dealt with them. The changes I made to my email management were a success. If you are having trouble with email, I encourage you to read that post.

Also in that vein, Chris Anderson has published an Email Charter. It consists of “10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral”. Are these 10 rules new, or a real breakthrough? No. However, if we could just get most people follow them, our email lives would be much easier. I’m going to spread the word, I’m even thinking of putting a link to the site in my (nonexistent) signature.

By the way, David Pogue has put forth a few additional rules of his own:

11. Don’t Use Mailbocks. You might think that you’re clever by signing up for one of those anti-spam services that require e-mail senders to take a test on a Web page, proving that we’re human. But you have a lot of nerve sending me an e-mail question — and then blocking my reply. I don’t have time to take your little humanity test. The worst part: I don’t discover that you’re blocking my reply until AFTER I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it.

12. Use BCC for Your E-mail Blasts. When you send out jokes or those insipid ‘heartwarming’ anecdotes, don’t just put everyone you know into the To: line. Instead, put all your addressees into the BCC (blind carbon copy) line. We’ll still get your e-mail blast, but we won’t see each others’ e-mail addresses. You’re preserving our privacy and saving us the scrolling through six inches of address information.

13. Clean Up Your Forwards. On the same topic (jokes and insipid tales): before you pass them on, clean up those carets (>>>>>>) that have accumulated from all the forwarding. They make the things impossible to read. (Paste the message into Word; use Find and Replace to search for the “>” character and replace it with nothing.)

14. Omit the Legal Vomit. I roll my eyes at the nine-sentence legal disclaimer that some companies insist on stamping at the bottom of every single message. I’ve got news for you: that confidentiality disclaimer has never wound up protecting a company from whatever it’s supposed to protect them from. When your actual e-mail message is only a fraction as long as your legal disclaimer, you look like an idiot.

15. Intersperse Your Replies. If you’re replying to a message that had a lot of different statements or questions, consider clicking after each response-requiring sentence, hitting Return, and typing your answer there. The result looks like a conversation, and makes it clear what you’re referring to. (But if you’re supplying only one response, put it up top so we don’t have to scroll down.)

P.S. I’m really glad I’m not the only one that uses “EOM“.

How to Make the Office a Place Where Work Gets Done

jpreardon — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:31:58 +0000

Jason Fried hits the nail on the head regarding the current state of office productivity in this TED Talk (embedded below). Namely, interruptions are shredding our work days up into tiny 10 or 15 or 30 minute increments during which we are expected to get meaningful work done. Obviously, this is far from ideal. Towards the end of the talk, he offers some recommendations–my favorite being the suggestion of canceling the next meeting on your calendar.

Also, there’s an interview with Jason on the Big Think site that touches on this subject, among other things.

Phoning it In

jpreardon — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 18:15:10 +0000

I have this great, old rotary phone. Yes, it still works, and yes, I still use it. It rings with a warm tone that the iPhone’s “old phone” ringtone does a really poor job of mimicking. It sits next to the couch and rarely moves. Although, it does have a 25 foot cord, so it can be dragged about the apartment without too much effort. But, it normally stays in place because it has a specific purpose. It is used for conversations about nothing in particular with people I really care about. I generally reserve those sorts of conversations for face-to-face meetings. But, that’s not always possible.

These sorts of conversations are somewhat rare these days, and apparently not just for me. The Times has found a few people that seem to really hate the using the phone, and for good reason. A lot of us spend (or spent) a good portion of our working days cradling a handset–and have the lingering neck pain to prove it. The thought of yapping on the phone after hours just isn’t all that appealing. I’ll also be the first person to defend other sorts of messaging. Email and text messages can be way less intrusive and more to the point than a phone call. What if you have no “point” though?

A conversation with no point is often referred to as “catching up”. While this may be a thorn in the side of productivity, it’s not such a bad way to stay connected with people you want to stay connected to. Sure, there’s Facebook and the like that threaten to make us all a little bit too connected. But, a wall post here and there really isn’t the same as hearing somebody’s voice, is it?

EOM?

jpreardon — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 17:25:19 +0000

Shame on me, I thought EOM was common knowledge. Looking back on it now, it probably would have been less effort to write a paragraph about the package in the email. Live and learn.

Habit Fields

jpreardon — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:00:36 +0000

Do you believe in Habit Fields? After reading Jack Cheng’s recent post on A List Apart, I do. He does a better job of explaining what he is talking about than I can ever hope to do here. So, just go read it.

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Communication is Expensive

jpreardon — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:47:52 +0000

Communication is expensive indeed. I’m not talking about long distance minutes here (those are quite inexpensive these days). I’m referring to communication between people on a team and within an organization. Everyone agrees that good communication is essential, but unnecessary communication saps productivity.

Joel Spolsky hits the nail on the head with his aptly titled column in Inc. magazine: A Little Less Conversation. He writes mostly about the challenge of reducing unneeded communication in a growing company, but his insights apply to larger, more established organizations as well.

Etiquette for the Tech Set

Multitaskers are Bad at Multitasking

jpreardon — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:34:21 +0000

A study conducted by a group of Stanford Researchers proves what many have suspected all along: People who claim to be good at multitasking really aren’t that stellar at multitasking.

“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”

Maybe, for these folks, it’s time to turn off The Twitter so they can get some stuff done.

via slashdot

Harvest on iPhone Sync Problem

jpreardon — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:04:41 +0000

Harvest now has an iPhone application (built and distributed by Y Factorial). It’s really slick, and a welcome alternative to the browser based iPhone solution that came previously. I tested it out last week, and it worked great. Today, however, is a different story.

Note the 4 entries that need to be synced in the screenshot. No matter how much I shake my poor iPhone, those items just won’t sync with the server. Y Factorial notes that some users experience syncing problems, so maybe that is the case here. But, the comments in the iTunes store referring to the sync problem also talk about crashing, which hasn’t happened to me. The newness of this app doesn’t help matters as it seems there is little or no troubleshooting information available. At minimum, it would be nice if one could reset the app’s data file–just to ensure that a manually corrected timesheet doesn’t get hosed if the application successfully syncs in the future.

Update 2009-03-03: Y Factorial was super responsive, on this (see comment below). The log files from my phone may have been helpful, but I had been impatient and reinstalled the application. Anyway, reinstalling made it work, but I have not been able to replicate the sync problem again.

Leopard Spaces Tip: Moving Windows

jpreardon — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:45:07 +0000

Recently, I discovered that one can hold a window while switching Spaces in Leopard. The window can then be dropped onto any other space. This, of course, isn’t the only way to move a window to another space. But, I like this better than dragging windows off the screen.

Here’s how it’s done:

Grab the window you wish to move by clicking and holding with the mouse.
Switch spaces directly (default: ^ Number Key) or with the arrow keys (default: ^ Arrow Key).
Drop the window on the desired space.

The movie below shows these steps in action. On my keyboard, using the arrow keys to switch spaces is cumbersome, so I usually use the ^ Number Key combination to switch directly to the space I want.

If you can’t see the movie above, you can download the Quicktime file directly.

For more tips, take a look at this Spaces tips screencast (the production values are much higher than my Quicktime movie).

Create New Files with Quicksilver

jpreardon — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:03:02 +0000

Lifehacker demonstrates how to set up Quicksilver so that one can easily create new files–of any type. This is especially useful for anyone who has template files that they use on a regular basis. Related Posts Quicksilver: Keeping Hands on (…)

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