another coffee, please » general

A Framework for Inbox Zero (Gmail centric)

phoebe — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 04:38:16 +0000

I heard about Inbox Zero way back in 2008, but shrugged it off as something that other people used because they got so many emails and never replied to them. Here is a quick recap of some of the links that capture the spirit and reasoning behind Inbox Zero:

43 Folders series of articles on Inbox Zero
the Inbox Zero video (long – will open in a new window)

With the proliferation of all the “social” sites around these days (Google+, Facebook, newsletters, group buy sites, Twitter.. the list goes on) I just get way too many emails to deal with on a daily basis. So I’ve decided to be strong, cut what I don’t need, and most importantly create and stick to a procedural way of dealing with emails.

I did a lot of reading on Inbox Zero before I started on my quest. It’s important for me to be able to deal with 100% of the problem, because if it’s only 99% that additional one percent keeps creeping up .. and creeping.. and creeping.. until it turns into a problem I can’t solve, and I’m back at square one. There are a lot of blogs outlining various ways to solve the problem. There are games and plugins. There are rules such as “only check your inbox once an [hour|day|week]” or “if you can’t answer it in two minutes or less, don’t”. Which of these should you follow? How on earth are you supposed to keep all these rules AND have inbox peace and quiet?

I think of Inbox Zero as a framework with one very important outcome: everything is out of my inbox. There is no “hard and fast” way of achieving it as everyone is different (some people like to delete things straight away, but I just couldn’t!). Some people like to use lots of tools, but I like being able to do things from any medium, without a dependency such as a firefox plugin that becomes a bit of an excuse.

Here is my framework:

1. Have a process. It has to work for you. Do you get lots of questions? File them to answer them together. I get a lot of junk mail in my inbox, so I have a process to filter them, and I have set labels to “__1, __2, __3″ so I can sort them in order of how important they are to me so I read them in order. If a process isn’t working for you, change it so it does. Most importantly though is to stick to it. There is no easier way to lose your mailbox than by sabotaging your carefully thought out process.

2. Be ruthless. Inbox Zero is not about the “maybe one days”. It’s about making a decision about anything that comes into your sight. Is it something you need to action? Mark it, file it, job done. Have you received the same email newsletter every week that you never bother reading? Unsubscribe right now and don’t worry about it ever again.

3. Be responsible. If you are supposed to have replied to that email from two weeks ago that you didn’t because you can’t be bothered, make a responsible grown-up decision. Yes, I will answer it (Mark it OR action it, file it, job done!) or No, I will delete it – if it was important they will email back. This is the hard one for me, and Inbox Zero has helped me take responsibility for the things I may have just left to languish in a pile of unread email…

4. Email takes time. It doesn’t have to be a LOT of time, although initially the cleanup of my inbox was like spring cleaning after a long winter (I had thousands of emails to go through!). Once you get to a state where you are starting with a blank slate, every email that you see in your inbox should be important, and therefore you need to take time to respond to it. I find that with less email cluttering my inbox, I take the time to consider what I should do with a particular message, and put more thought into actions or responses.

5. There are always bad days. I haven’t had one of these yet, because I’ve just started being aware of keeping my inbox nice and tidy (and empty!). When I go overseas though I have no doubt that I’m going to lose track of where I was, there will be spam that I haven’t yet created a filter for, and things will break. I’m telling myself now that I will be patient when I see the overgrown mess in my inbox, and that I will take time out to tidy it up, update my processes (filters, labels, and so on), and return my inbox to that wonderful state of Zero.

These are my five reminders of how to keep my inbox clean. I think they are general enough for me to work even if I change all my labels and filters and even the email application I’m using. I’m trying to apply the same concepts to my work email which is a completely different type of email chaos – I need a slightly different focus, because my work depends on me being able to respond to lots of questions, whereas my personal mail tends to be handling of the occasional important email and mostly invoices and receipts.

What is your process for Inbox Zero? Do you operate along similar rules/ideas or do you have much more solid processes around what happens to each email? Let me know in the comments!

R U Okay?

phoebe — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:38:55 +0000

Today is one of those days. Not enough sleep, too much work, trying to do too much in too little time and trying to be perfect. My usual basket of worries multiplied tenfold and all coming at me at once. I woke up feeling absolutely crappy, sick in the stomach, and even my usual “don’t worry you’ll get a coffee soon” self-pep-talk didn’t work. I just wanted to curl up and lie in bed and cry – so I did.

Then I got up and got dressed (after some cajoling from Z) and checked my work email, and freaked out bigtime about some numbers I’d sent to someone that looked OK last night but were absolutely totally utterly wrong, and I went back to crying in bed. In my work clothes. Absolutely drained and it wasn’t even 7:30am.

It took me a long time to decide not to go to work in the morning, because I don’t want to appear as though I’m “chucking a sickie” but I knew if I went to work and someone – maybe a colleague, maybe a client, maybe some stranger – looked at me the wrong way and insinuated I wasn’t capable of doing a billion things at once, I would just crack and start bawling my eyes out. I say this from experience. I know I have a breaking point.

A friend of mine posted a link on his Facebook wall to RUOK?day which is today, October 7. I’m not normally one for these things (except Daffodil Day because I love their merch) and when I first heard of it on TV I thought it was a little bit of a gimmicky “I like it on..” concept. I imagined hordes of teenagers posting R U OK LOL on their Facebook statuses and Twitters. Not for me, I thought!

But today when I woke up and felt really overwhelmed, it was the stories on that site via videos that really touched me. A woman, seeing a guy standing on his roof ready to take his own life, stops to have a chat at 3 in the morning, and changes his life. A paramedic who has seen the horrible results of suicide needing similar support himself after he’s diagnosed with manic depression. These things touched me and made my problems seem a lot less significant. Bearable.

There wasn’t anybody to ask me if I was okay this morning (at least not until after Z had gone to work) so I asked myself. And I was surprised at the answer, because once I’d come back to reality, all the worry and stress of the things I’m expected to do lifted. I wasn’t feeling pressured to be AT work or to BE someone or to GET ALL THIS STUFF DONE. ”Are you okay?” I asked, and the answer was “yes”.

I’m not sure who’ll read this post, but if you do, let me ask you a question. ”How are things going for you?”

And Now For Something A Little Different…

phoebe — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:49:57 +0000

My boyfriend is moving in today! This makes me a very happy camper! Now the interesting part (and I suppose relevant) is how we’re going to coexist happily when we’re both nerds with our own ideas of what is good (he likes MSSQL. Enough said.)

My grand plan involves a network that can support:

my virtual environment (VMWare)
Macs (my macbook), PCs, the Wii, Linux, etc
HTPC / media server – for watching movies! also for going through photos when the family comes over
file server – because we really have that much STUFF. We both still have assignments from our uni days!

It all sounds relatively easy, and given that we already have a wireless router at hand it shouldn’t be too hard to set up. I hope to share my experience here particularly with anything that comes up unexpectedly and how we resolve issues… even the personal differences ;)

ACP time

phoebe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:46:25 +0000

Also, I just noticed that I hadn’t set the proper timezone for this blog. It should be correct to UTC +11 now (ie. Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time).

And now for some easy listening…

phoebe — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:16:15 +0000

I’m a gamer and a Family Guy fan, so this video really struck a chord with me. It’s a Seth McFarlane special from the Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy on youtube.

Mario rescues the Princess, Seth McFarlane style (via Kotaku)

Getting Out Of Here

phoebe — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:47:34 +0000

I’m 23, and I live at home with my parents. It’s not quite as embarrassing to admit as it would have been, say, a decade ago. It’s so expensive to move out, for one thing; my parent’s place is gigantic (room for more!); I don’t have to clean up after myself (yes, Mum, I’ll clean my room.. when I want to) and, well, it’s just so easy. At least, so I’ve told myself for the last five years. (Five years before that I was hating my parents, the world, school, and boys, and wanted to wear black and listen to Marilyn Manson all day.)

But things are getting a little, well, stale. I’ll be the first to say there’s nothing wrong with my family or my living situation. Hell, I have an incredible disposable income. But sometimes there’s just this desire to suffer. I want to wake up on a Saturday and groan because I have an apartment with various toilets, bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms to clean (I’m very spoilt at home.) I want to choose my furniture. Oh, hell, I want to pay the rent late and have someone very cross on the phone telling me they have seven kids to feed.

Of course, I’m not the kind of person to do things by halves. It would be easy to move out into Sydney’s inner ‘burbs. Too easy. I’m not thinking about simply throwing down a deposit on a place and being out of home next week. Oh, no. I want to move – to California.

There are a couple of reasons I have chosen a destination over twelve thousand kilometres away (about 7.5k miles). One, a boy. (What else!) He’s adorable, charming, and is prepared to move in with me. That solves problem #1, and that’s getting around; as convenient as the US is, it is not known for its public transport. Two, the booming IT industry. Sure. I could choose any place in the world and say the same thing (except maybe Uzbekistan or any city in Australia) but there is no place quite as appealing as SIlicon Valley to a little tech head like me.

Three, that a lot of people speak English. I guess I don’t like the thought of having to learn a new language and settle in as well.

And finally, that it’s twelve thousand miles away from everything I know. There’s no running home to Mum and Dad if I get scared, or if there’s a spider in my room (ack!) or if I lock myself out of the house (which I just did last Saturday). This is me, and this is the world, and hello me, welcome to Harsh Reality.

I’ve given myself just over seven months to work this out. It sounds like a long time; it sounds like no time at all. I am scared, and I am getting prepared. Hopefully I can use this blog as a bit of an outlet and a bit of a motivator(!) to burst my idyllic childhood bubble and get the hell out of here.

Another Coffee, Please?

phoebe — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:15:20 +0000

Hello and welcome to my first post! I’m going to be writing about my interests here, and mostly while I’m at work (hence the strange blog title, I guess!). There are a couple of topics I’m most interested in, although of course I expect these to change over the course of this blog…

Computers

It probably makes sense, since I studied Computer Science at university (and quickly escaped, programming not being my forte). I’m always thinking about upgrading my home computers, or buying a new, nifty gadget that will make my life no better (but is oh so fun!). I’d like to write about these things and hopefully make it somewhat interesting to read even if you’re not a computer person.

World of Warcraft

I don’t think I’ll be able to make this interesting if you’re not a WoW player already, but I will try my best. I won’t explain anything that I think is common knowledge to a wow-er or a gamer but do feel free to comment if you want me to be more verbose! I used to play a lot more than I do now, but I do find a lot of things interesting from both technical and social perspectives, as well! Yes, I’m one of those gamers who plays games to actually MEET people…

Food

I like it. I like talking about it and I like eating it. Enough said!

Travel

The first major trip I did on my own was a three week holiday to the United States (southern part of California, mostly) in late 2007. I realised quite how fun it is organising and experiencing different places and cultures, and I’d love to travel some more even just within Australia. I’d like to document some of these thoughts so I don’t lose them..!

I’m also a big fan of Sydney – you have to love it to live here, they say. When my boyfriend came to visit a few weeks ago I got to do some of the touristy things I don’t usually bother with because I live here. I’d love to write these down both as a memento of my recent holiday and perhaps to inspire other people to seek out the interesting facets of what is a truly vivid city.

And that’s all for now!