Posts Filed Under ‘Workflow’
How to Stay on Top of Ye Olde Email Inbox
June 9th, 2009, 3 comments
Inbox Zero is a topic path well-trodden in the productivity blogosphere, but two books and a few blogs about personal productivity later, staying on top of my email is still a daily challenge for me. While I don't get down to zero every day, I do get there once or twice a week--usually when my inbox overflows onto the next page. (In Gmail, that's when I get past 50 conversations.) Over at my Harvard Business blog, I ran down my tried and true techniques for keeping the electronic mail under control. If you're suffering from a severe case of overload or could just use a refresher, check out Extreme Makeover: The Email Inbox Edition.
May 25th, 2009, 3 comments
Artist Jorge Colombo drew the image that graces the June 1st cover of The New Yorker magazine with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone app. Virtually "finger-painting" an image like this onto a tiny iPhone touchscreen seems insane and inconvenient, but Colombo has good reasons. The New Yorker reports:
He discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.)
Drawing on the iPhone also offers the artist anonymity. Colombo stood in Times Square for an hour drawing this image on his iPhone and no one gave him a second look. Unlike if he had been painting with an easel, passersby just assumed he was checking his email.
Surely sales of the Brushes app will go through the roof this week as aspiring artists scramble to replicate Colombo's work. Of course, Ken Rockwell was right when he asserted that it's an artist's eye, patience, and skill that makes a good image, not the tools he or she uses. See a video of this drawing come to life below.
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May 24th, 2009, 5 comments
I've got my own pie chart of how I want to spend my time, so it was fun to hear that Jim Collins, author of bestselling book Good to Great, also has a similar breakdown, pictured right. The New York Times reports:
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Collins is a whole lot more diligent about tracking his progress than I've ever been, though.
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May 19th, 2009, 14 comments
Once you get past a simple to-do list and start getting into the heavy-lifting of complex team projects, it's time to look into project management software. My only memories of my project management course in college are dreadful words like milestones, Gantt charts, and critical paths. Still, when you've got a group of people at work on a long-term undertaking with lots of tasks associated with it, you need something to help manage the flow.
I asked my Twitter followers what project management software they use at home and at work, and how they like it on a scale of 1 to 10. I got fewer replies to this question than usual, which makes me think lots of people don't use a PM app to begin with. Out of the 97 replies I did get, 17 said they use 37 Signals' Basecamp (and gave it an 8 out of 10 average rating), 12 said they used Microsoft Project (it averaged a 6.6 out of 10 rating), and, interestingly, 9 people said they like Things (which averaged a 7.7 rating) and OmniFocus (which got a rating of 9), both for Mac OS X.
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Flashbake Version Control for Creative Writers
April 29th, 2009
Over the last few months my programmer self has gotten sucked into a full-on love affair with source version control system Git and a Git host, GitHub. Explaining Git to non-coder humans is almost impossible, but this morning I gave it a try. Over at Lifehacker my writer self reviewed Flashbake, scripts that offer writers automated version control using Git. What I love about Flashbake is that it automatically includes ambient information about the weather, your Twitter status, and what music you've been listening to into each version's commit message, so you can reconstruct your entire creative process with full snapshots and a log of what you'd been doing and hearing at the time. Here's the full story: Flashbake Automates Version Control for (Nerdy) Writers. (Here's my writing repository at GitHub.)
April 29th, 2009, 8 comments
Moved into a new apartment this weekend (hence the lack of posts recently) and I'm already missing my old home office. Just in time, Argentinian tech blog ALT1040 featured photos of it and my rather stock setup: the Ikea Jerker desk, MacBook Pro, iCurve, and Dell widescreen monitor. Commenters panned the photos ("Esta bastante feo"), but it's not really the stuff you use, it's how you use it, right? My new office is currently a jungle of boxes and desk parts, but reassembly is well under way. Rest assured I won't bore you with new pictures when it is. 
Cures for Common Productivity Problems
April 1st, 2009, 4 comments
On a day when everyone is partaking in all sorts of April Fool's shenanigans, I got serious over at Lifehacker with my feature story on reusable solutions to common productivity problems. Of course, people actually suffering from these problems may not make it to the end of the 1,700 word manifesto, but you get a gold star if you do.
March 23rd, 2009, 6 comments
Stanford graduate Ramit Sethi's personal finance blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is one of Lifehacker's most-quoted sources of financial advice, so I was honored when Sethi asked me to contribute a bit to his new book, also entitled I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Sethi's direct, authoritative style (evidenced by the blog and book title) may put you off at first glance. But on closer inspection you'll find he's an approachable, sensible guy, not some jerk trying to sell you a "foolproof" make-a-million-dollars-a-month system.
In fact, the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book, which went on sale today, is an excellent graduation gift for the college students in your life who are venturing out into a horrible economy steeped in student debt. To get a taste of what it's like, download the introduction PDF for free.
When you do get the book, you can find my contribution on page 134, a short piece on how I automate my week-to-week transactions in order to set and track long-term goals. Here's a full reprint.
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March 23rd, 2009, 2 comments
Got a case of the Mondays this morning? Techie Andre Torrez says he loves Mondays because:
It's the start of the week. You get to see what ideas that were so important on Friday stayed important until Monday. [...] Mondays are a fresh start. They're like a reset button for the doldrums of your Wednesday afternoon meetings where two people are going on about something the other eight people in the room don't even understand.
I need to work on an attitude like his. Here's to appreciating the weekly reset button. The full post from Andre: I heart Mondays.
March 19th, 2009, 3 comments
One of the lesser-known aspects of Gmail Labs' useful Canned Responses feature is that it's available as a filter action. This means you can auto-reply to messages that match criteria you set up with a canned response. For example, you can say that any message from Aunt Bertha with "Fwd" in the subject line should automatically get the response: "I love you Aunt Bertha, but please stop forwarding me chain letters."
As for me, I'm using this to deal with certain particularly persistent public relations people who send press releases to my personal email address. I used to just automatically filter those messages to a label I never look at; now, I can automatically reply with the following using canned responses:
Hi--Looks like you've sent me a press release. Please remove my email address from your mailing list.
Then shuttle the message off to a label I never look at. Check out the setup in the screenshot above. In the second screen of the filter creation process, check off "Send canned response" and choose the one you've set up from the list.
For more on enabling Gmail Labs and its best features, see my picks for best Labs features (including Canned Responses).
March 11th, 2009, 3 comments
Good strong filters can go a long way in processing your email based on rules you set up automatically. (Think: "Delete any Fwd from Aunt Bertha that mentions Rush Limbaugh automatically.") Gmail Labs just added a new filter import/export feature, which lets you back up, save, import, export, and swap useful email filters, so I did just that over at Lifehacker this morning.
Hit up my feature story that offers 10 useful filters in a downloadable, importable XML file for your Gmail filtering pleasure.
March 10th, 2009, 10 comments
In the depths of email overload desperation last week, I wished email messages had an 140-character limit like Twitter updates do. In response, two people recommended doing what Kevin Rose does: Set your desktop email signature to "Sent from my mobile phone."
It's a white lie that makes you look less rude for being short. It's annoying to have to fib (and embarrassing if you get caught somehow--of course all of Kevin's friends now know his "secret"). But for someone who gets more than 100 messages per day, this technique may be a matter of survival versus just saving time. Haven't set this up myself yet, but if I wind up at the bottom of another email mountain getting ready for a processing marathon, I just might.
Making Taxes Less Taxing
March 4th, 2009
Got to put on my personal finance hat over at Lifehacker this morning in my feature on how to squeeze every last dollar out of your income tax return. Six years of being a freelancer and tax time still stresses me out a little bit, but keeping better records and having a trustworthy accountant helps alot.
February 26th, 2009, 19 comments
This succinct set of workday guidelines is a nice blueprint for getting productive on the important stuff and ruthless about cutting the crap. Written on a unknown "major corp" whiteboard pictured here, they read:
QUALITY vs quantity, UX process.
Check email ONLY:
Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.
FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki
MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking
OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~
These common productivity edicts are worth repeating; recently I advised Harvard Business readers to use a daily three-item task list myself. I've been practicing this technique every weekday without fail for the last six weeks, and it's served me well (though I've gotten cocky and the list has started inching up to five or six items). On top of sleeping, showering, eating, working out, commuting, cooking, and communicating, the reality is that three things DONE is a bigger set of accomplishments than it seems. As for the rest of these--well, I'm working on them. Hat tip to Caterina.
February 9th, 2009, 10 comments
60 Minutes interviews Coldplay's front man Chris Martin about how he writes hit songs. Being "openly neurotic," Martin makes sure he captures song ideas the moment they strike him--even if it means scribbling them onto his piano with a Sharpie. He's got a marker holder mounted to his whitewashed piano for just that purpose, as shown. In the video below, reporter Steve Croft asks about it.
Croft: You have notes written on the piano?
Martin: Yeah, look, but this is just the beginning. In six months, this will all be covered.
Croft: And you have to repaint the piano?
Martin: Yeah. When we finish something, we repaint.
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