The Piano Inside My Brain

One of the keys to being an email Ninja is the tools you use. For many people, the choices are Outlook or Gmail. Lifehacker brings us the following post:

• Outlook vs. Gmail - The Definitive Comparison

They talk about everything useful, from search to folders/labels to rules/filters to contacts to spam and more. Gmail is getting better all the time and I find myself appreciating it more and more. I gave up on Outlook years ago when I switched to the Mac.

On Friday, NPR’s Morning Edition ran the following segment:

Can you go a day at the office without e-mail? Employees at U.S. Cellular try to do that every Friday. A policy implemented a few years ago gives workers a respite from the e-mail avalanche.
Click to read and listen…

Interesting story considering the topic of my recent post about choosing the right messaging medium. I appreciated that the story points out the initial resistance from people, but ultimately, people made additional connections with others.

While you might not be able to force your organization, you can do this yourself, perhaps for a whole day, or even just a couple of hours.

Sometimes you just have to take a step back and point out the obvious.

Today was one of those times. I was in the middle of typing out a detailed email message that was going to be longer than five sentences when a blinding flash of the obvious hit me: pick up the phone.

So I did and it worked. I’m glad that I started typing the email, but very glad that I didn’t click send. Starting to type things out allowed me to collect my thoughts around a difficult conversation. When I picked up the phone, I was clear and concise and convincing. And I think the person that I talked to appreciated that.

Many business professionals carry around an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo or other smartphone. So there is the opportunity to talk, text message or email right from the palm of your hand. But it doesn’t take an email ninja to know when to use the right tool, just one simple rule:

Respect the recipient.

If you have something difficult to share with someone, don’t hide behind an email message. Yes, write a letter or create an outline to organize your thoughts at first. Hiding behind the email message will actually make it more difficult for you in the long run. My rule is that if you are having a hard time picking up the phone, you probably really need to pick up the phone.

If you need an answer right away, email is not the best choice. Yes it is true, email is seriously fast, but it also creates email inbox clutter. Most people leave hundreds or thousands of messages in their email, so if you can simply send a quick instant message with your question, you might just get an immediate answer!

Text messages are great for the one-liners that are time sensitive. Examples such as, “Caught in long meeting and running late,” or “Please stop for pizza on the way home,” or “Do not cut the blue wire.” SMS is relatively instant and if for some reason it doesn’t get through, it keeps trying. For the recipient, they get some form of a beep. If needed, responses are typically very short, such as “No prob,” “OK,” or “Too late.”

What are your best suggestions that “respect the recipient” for phone, email, IM and text messages?

For those of you that work in an office, you know that around 3pm you start getting just a bit tired. So what to do? Another cup of coffee or get more rest at night? Nope, take a 20 minute nap.

Mind you, it may be hard for you to convince your boss that a post-lunch siesta will increase productivity. My suggestion is that you point her to this article at Ars Technica and then make her read the entire Sleep Journal to locate the study.

My suggestion is that you get more sleep at night, drink a ridiculous amount of coffee in the morning and then sleep through afternoon meetings.

I’ve been a huge fan of 37signals Basecamp for several years now. We have been using it with our clients for almost two full years now and the results are amazing.

What is great about 37signals is that they keep making Basecamp better and better. Little by little they roll out new features to Basecamp, sometimes minor enhancements, sometimes huge changes.

But the real result is the change in how we work with our clients.

With Basecamp, we keep our clients in the loop at all times throughout the entire project. Our customers definitely appreciate the open approach and our employees have a central location of “truth.”

If you manage a few projects or hundreds, sign up for a free trial account and give Basecamp a try.

I have three computers: home, work and my laptop. While I prefer to use Safari, often I find myself in Firefox since it has broader support. And even worse, I find myself testing sites in Internet Explorer through virtual machines. And I browse sites through my iPhone.

My website bookmarks were a mess and they were scattered everywhere. Enter Social Bookmarking with Del.icio.us.

What is the next step? Go to Del.icio.us and sign up for an account. Then to make it interesting, add me to your network. My bookmarks are wide open.

First, go read Seth Godin’s post: Signal to noise

I agree, it is too much. Why has is gotten so loud? The answer is simple: Web 2.0 enables conversations and the more people and businesses that come to the party, the louder it will get.

So how do you deal with all of the noise? Listen for the echoes from the crowds.

I think that you have to start trusting the noise rather than trying to sift through it. The genuinely great ideas, articles, events, products, companies, people, etc. will naturally receive the votes of the crowd and create a “virtual echo” that is powerful enough to hear beyond the first post.

So consider your experience. If you subscribe to RSS feeds, don’t try to read everything. Skim the lists and then search for interesting posts across all of your feeds. Don’t try to catch up if you get behind. The good stuff will stick around thanks to the wisdom of the crowd.

I’m a very big fan of Merlin Mann of 43folders, especially for his writings and talks about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system as well as Merlin’s Inbox Zero methodology. But one of my favorite “techie” things is the Hipster PDA.

This is really nothing new but I find that in addition to all of the different tech toys that I have a slightly unhealthy obsession, the addition of the Hipster PDA to my arsenal about 9 months ago has proven very valuable.

It’s a stack of 3×5 cards and a pen.

Actually for me, it is several well placed stacks of 3×5 cards (in my car, on my desk at work, on my desk at home) plus this portable leather “jotter” from Staples which is much more comfortable than a binder clip in my pants. I also have a compact pen pen that is always with the jotter.

Since I “process” the cards from it (GTD), I also keep any receipts in there, rather than make my wallet expand.

I’ve turned a few people on to this, some techies and some not. My biggest surprise was that I’ve actually gotten more use and happiness from my gadgets with this around. I don’t try to make the gadgets do things that they are not suited to do.

I come across a lot of interesting technology things. When something spurs my interest, I usually give it a shot. Usually that shot lasts about two weeks to see if anything interesting will come from the trial. Most services completely crash and burn, but some stick.

For example, I tried Jott and I use it almost every day for something. The service actually makes things more convenient for me.

Other services didn’t fare so well. For example, Mint. I don’t want to have to go in and categorize everything or relabel everything. I just want to enter receipts and track my accounts. And since I don’t enter receipts in Mint, rather I wait until they show up in the online banking, I don’t actually get a clear view of my finances. I’m sure that if I used Mint for several months, I might find more value in the service, but the first two weeks were painful and not particularly useful. Even worse, my weekly summary from Mint rarely shows up. So I stopped trusting it. Honestly, it seemed like they were more interested in trying to convince me to sign up for a Capital One card rather than help track my finances.

The idea behind the two weeks is that the trial might turn into a habit. And if it is something that is actually worth the effort, two weeks is about the right amount of time to use the service at least a few times to see if I actually like it.

I’ve got a couple currently in the middle of a trial period right now. I’ll report back on how they do…

Jason Fried of 37signals offers the following post:

• Workplace Experiments

What I especially like are the 4-day work weeks. It is a similar concept to Google giving you one day per week to work on your own projects, except the project is actually about making sure that you are fully rested and refreshed.

It is too easy to simply work more hours to try to get more done. I can relate to 37signals experiment because I find that my best work comes when I get plenty of rest, exercise, and spend time with my family.