Feb
21
A lazy man’s successful war on email
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(reposted from my old blog to maintain a copy…)
Like essentially everyone I know, I have struggled under the weight of an overflowing inbox for almost as long as I’ve had an email account (something like 15 years now). Like my smoking habit, I’ve tried countless times to wrestle email into submission using an endless stream of productivity strategies, tools and gizmos: GTD, ‘Take Back Your Life’, Good Experience/Bit Literacy, Gootodo,Logitech IO pens, Hipster PDAs, Moleskines, and the good ole “Leaving Emails I Need To Work On as Unread” system. None of them have really stuck, mainly because there have always been key pieces that take more effort than my lazy ass is willing to put into them.
After a lot of thought (I’m intensely diligent when it comes to enabling my own laziness) I’ve come up with a system that works for me. It borrows bits and pieces from most of the things I’ve tried, but far and away the closest to what I do is Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. I’ve been using it successfully for about 6 months (including the massive email task of returning from two separate vacations) which is huge for me.
Aug
31
A lazy man’s successful war on email
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(This post has been updated here, but is left in place for those who might have it linked)
Like essentially everyone I know, I have struggled under the weight of an overflowing inbox for almost as long as I’ve had an email account (something like 15 years now). Like my smoking habit, I’ve tried countless times to wrestle email into submission using an endless stream of productivity strategies, tools and gizmos: GTD, ‘Take Back Your Life’, Good Experience/Bit Literacy, Gootodo, Logitech IO pens, Hipster PDAs, Moleskines, and the good ole “Leaving Emails I Need To Work On as Unread” system. None of them have really stuck, mainly because there have always been key pieces that take more effort than my lazy ass is willing to put into them.
After a lot of thought (I’m intensely diligent when it comes to enabling my own laziness) I’ve come up with a system that works for me. It borrows bits and pieces from most of the things I’ve tried, but far and away the closest to what I do is Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. I’ve been using it successfully for about 6 months (including the massive email task of returning from two separate vacations) which is huge for me.
Read on, MacDuff….
Nov
6
Reading in reader
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After being a Newsgator user for a couple of years, I’ve started using Google Reader for feed reading. Even though Newsgator has great client apps for all of the platforms I use each day (OS X, Vista and Windows Mobile), I just got tired of having to pay for this, that and the other thing. I am a cheap bastard.
I’ve been really impressed with the latest release of Reader (especially the keyboard shortcuts for navigation) and it’s nice not having to worry about syncing all of my various feed reader clients as I move from work, to mobile, to home. It does NOT get along with IE7, which is a real bummer since IE7 on my Vista tablet pc is REALLY slick otherwise. The mobile site is good (in that there is one) but is really limited by it’s inability to “Mark all read”, and a pain to navigate with one hand on the Pocket PC phone.
Another result of using GR is that I’m tagging items a lot less to del.icio.us, and a lot more using the built in ’starring’ mechanism. I stumbled around and found rssmix.com, which I’m using to combine my Google Reader starred items and my del.icio.us feed. Things I tag/star will now show up over on the right in the “Recently interesting” box.
If for some bizarre reason you have a burning desire to subscribe to that hybrid feed, the url is: http://www.rssmix.com/u/16743/rss.xml
